SSW Foursquare

Controls - Do you use Text Boxes for displaying data?

Last updated by Brady Stroud [SSW] 7 months ago.See history

Use Label controls to display static text of the application. Eg. "Customer ID:" Use Text Box controls to display data (results of calculations, information, records from a database, etc.).

The reasons are:

  • users know it is data, not a label of the application
  • users can copy and paste from the field

PS: One reason web UI's are nice, is that the information is always selectable/copyable.

BetterInterface LabelCutOff
Figure: Bad Example - Not only is the data cut off when you are using label, but you can't copy and paste the value

Figure: Good Example - Using Textbox controls makes the data obvious to users

As you can see you'll barely know the difference, so start using Textboxes for displaying data, that's good practice.

More Information

When using TextBox controls in Windows Forms, set them up like this:

Figure: Having the 'BorderStyle' Property set to Fixed3D is the best choice visually

Figure: Make the text box Read-Only (users copying data is OK, changing is silly)

Interfaces (WinForms Controls)
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