Creating an UI that the user can change

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I'm interested in giving the user an interface where they can drag and drop elements and connect them together to create a sort of a visual program. (think Grasshopper for Rhino)
Are there any .NET C# APIs that would help me with this project? (ideally freeware and can be used in commercial products)
Thanks!

Posted 6-May-11 3:52am

Mihai Pruna

Updated 6-May-11 3:55am

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Nagy Vilmos · Answer 1 · 2011-05-06T04:24:00

This is not a /don't do it/answer, but try approaching it the other way.

I have implimented more than one /configurable/ UI's and the overriding requirement is that sites, rather than users, need to be able to configure the UI. If you start with a server side business and a config driven layout it's pretty not too complex. You need to decide which user controls are to be supported and how the user can configure them. In the real world, having a text file listing fields is the best way and then let the UI decide on the layout.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 2 · 2011-05-06T06:19:00

I don't know any library used to accomplish this, but I have done dynamically generated UI in different settings. This is quite feasible but needs thorough architecture.

If I did it right now based on your idea, I would first define a data model if the UI, which is a non-trivial software architecture exercise. The implementation is easier. The model can be expressed in terms of a set of pure data classes and represent a meta² layer of the model representing the application field. This application field can be as wide and abstract as "UI design", but can be more limited, such as "Robot control UI design". The user data would be an object graph represented by the instances of the data classes and their relationships. This would represent the meta¹ layer of the model, a meta-data as such. It would represent an already implemented instance if the UI. And the user of this UI would be working with meta⁰-data, which is just the data, and with the physical components of the computer system. The meta² layer in this approach can be hard-coded in some assembly, but the meta¹ which defined the shape of one of the possible UI in your system should be persist in the file between run time sessions. The best and non-intrusive way of doing it is using Data Contract.

When the concrete UI is implemented by the user of meta¹-data level (a designer of the UI), nothing should be re-compiled. The UI is generated on the fly out of the model. All controls are added based on the content of the data graph.

—SA

Creating an UI that the user can change

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