C# saving state of the form with all controls

Question

I have a form and I have some buttons doing stuff.

When I press buttons the windows form controls, like textboxes or group-boxes, buttons appear and disappear and change place on my form, for it is a dynamic form :)

However, what I'd like to do is have a button ( BACK ) that will get my form to the state it was before an action of a button, putting back the controls in the place and state they were before action.

I thought of a C class MyState() that will have something like an array of Form1. I will be saving the form state in that array and when I'll press the back button to get from array that "copy" of the Form state and maybe an index for indexing states.

I have no idea how to implement this, unfortunately. :|

Can anyone show me the right way to do this?

class Mystate
{
    private Form1 [] state;

    public Mystate(int n)
    {
        this.state = new Form1[n];
    }

    public Form1 this[int index]
    {
        get
        {
            return state[index];
        }
        set
        {
            this.state[index] = value;
        }
    }
}

Have you tried just serializing the form using BinarySerializer prior to each action and placing the serialized data in a stack? Not sure if Form and it's children are all serializable or not, but that would certainly be an easy approach if they are. — Eric J., Apr 05 '12 at 17:10
I don't really know what exactly you're trying to do but it sounds like you could just use a TabControl or something similar. — marinus, Apr 05 '12 at 17:13
possible duplicate of [Creating Wizards for Windows Forms in C#](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2340566/creating-wizards-for-windows-forms-in-c-sharp) — Hans Passant, Apr 05 '12 at 17:19
Of course serializing a form is not possible because it holds unmanaged operating system handles. — usr, Apr 05 '12 at 17:51

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

Sounds like you want an high level undo/redo feature for your forms.

Here is a framework for such things: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/10576/An-Undo-Redo-Buffer-Framework

Here is an answer that is close but not exactly the same as your question (The pattern implimented is the same though): How to implement good and efficient undo/redo functionality for a TextBox

MementoPattern: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/18025/Generic-Memento-Pattern-for-Undo-Redo-in-C

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 05 '12 at 17:55

Nothing like this is built-in. You have to do this on your own.

I'd do it like this: First, define precisely what state you want to save. Example:

Control.Bounds
Control.Text
Checkbox.IsChecked
NumericUpDown.Value
...

Now we know exactly what needs to be saved.

Seconds, we need a way to create a snapshot of the current state of the form and recursively for all controls. You can implement this using reflection so that everything will be automatic no matter how many controls you have.

Third, you need to be able to apply a snapshot to an instance of Form. This is the opposite process of (2). This also can be done using reflection.

C# saving state of the form with all controls

2 Answers2