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EWSoftware Image Map Controls
The EWSoftware Image Map Controls allow you to define hot spots on an
image and perform an action when a defined area is clicked. The current
version supports .NET 2.0 through .NET 3.5. A Windows Forms and a web server
image map control are included. Each contains a similar core set of features:
- All of the standard image types are supported (BMP, JPEG, GIF, etc).
- Support for animation is included for those image types that use it
such as GIF.
- The image's display height and width can be customized.
- Image areas can be defined using rectangles, circles, or polygons of
any shape defined by a set of points.
- Tab order and validation events are supported.
- Image areas can be triggered by clicking on them with the mouse or
by tabbing to them and hitting the Enter key.
- Image areas support a
Tag property so that you can
associate user-defined information with each image area.
- Both provide full design-time support including a graphical
image area selection tool that saves you from having to manually
determine and type in the area coordinates.
Web Server Image Map Control
The web server image map control renders a client-side image map that
supports all of the expected features including:
- Tooltip (alternate) text for each image area.
- An access key to select an image area by pressing ALT plus
the defined access key.
- Image areas can be enabled or disabled.
- The action can be set to navigate to a URL (the default), post back to
the server to fire a
Click event, or to do nothing and just
display a tool tip if one is specified.
- When set to navigate, the target window can be defined to open the
URL in a new or existing browser window.
- The navigate action can be used to execute client-side script.
- When set to post back, the event handler receives the index of the
clicked area and the coordinates of the click if supported.
In addition, custom attributes are supported to define additional behavior
such as onmouseover events, etc. The image map and its areas also
support view state so changes made to the controls across post backs are
retained.
The standard image map control supplied with ASP.NET 2.0 lacks many of
the features listed above and also lacks the superior design-time support
found in the EWSoftware.ImageMaps control. The web server image map
control has been tested in Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox 1.5, and Netscape
8.1. It also works well in earlier versions of those browsers and should
work well in any other browser that provides support for client-side image
maps.
Windows Forms Image Map Control
The Windows Forms image map control provides a similar control for
rich client applications. It displays the selected image within its
bounds and provides the following features:
- Scrolling is supported for displaying images larger than the bounds
of the control.
- For images smaller than the control, it can be set to center the image
within itself or shrink its bounds to fit the image.
- Tooltip text for each image area.
- An access key to select an image area by pressing ALT plus
the defined access key.
- Tab indexes can be defined for image areas so that the control
participates in the tab order of its parent.
- Image areas can be enabled or disabled.
- The action can be set to fire a
Click event or to do
nothing and just display a tool tip if one is specified.
- When set to fire the
Click event, the event handler
receives the index of the clicked area and the coordinates of the click.
- The control uses double-buffering for a smooth, flicker-free display.
- The Windows Forms control provides an additional
ImageAreaEllipse image area to make it easy to define elliptical
image areas.
- The image map and image areas support owner draw mode to allow you to
totally customize the display of the image map or individual image areas.
Image areas can be set to owner draw mode even if the image map itself is not.
- You can define event handlers on the image map to provide generic
handling of mouse and focus events for all image areas. In addition, the
image map will forward all mouse and focus events to the image areas so
that you can handle the events individually by connecting the appropriate
event handlers to the image areas themselves.
Demonstration Applications and Help File
The controls come with a Windows Forms and an ASP.NET web application that
demonstrate each of the controls. Versions of the demos are provided in both
C# and VB.NET. A help file is also provided that fully documents all classes,
properties, methods, and events contained within the EWSoftware.ImageMaps
namespaces.
Click the images for a larger view.
The first image shows the Image Area Collection Editor that is used to define
image areas. The second image shows the Coordinate Editor dialog used to
interactively define the image area on the image itself. Options are provided
to move and resize the image area.
The last image is a screenshot of the Windows Forms control demo. This form
demonstrates the owner draw and event handling abilities of the image map and
the image areas. The only control on the form is the ImageMap
control. The background gradient fill is drawn by the image map's owner draw
event handler. All other items seen are owner drawn image areas. The triangle
(a polygon area) in the middle has the focus. The Properties "button"
(an ellipse area) shows an example of hotlighting (the dark blue glow) with
the mouse over a non-focused owner drawn image area.
The shareware version of the EWSoftware ImageMap Controls can be downloaded
here:
NOTE: The shareware web server control renders a small link to this page
next to each image map. The shareware Windows Forms control watermarks the
top left of the image with a reference to this page. These do not appear
in the licensed version.
The supplied demo projects are Visual Studio 2005 projects but can be
opened and converted to Visual Studio 2008 projects without any problems.
New Feature Requests
The components in this library provide an extensive set of features. However,
everyone has different needs, some of which might not have been anticipated.
If you find that these controls are missing features that you need, please
feel free to make a request to have them added. Every effort will be made
to work them into a future release.
For a live demo of the web server control,
click here.
This is the same demo included in the download above. The download also
contains a compiled version of the Windows Forms demo application.
A single user license or a site license can be purchased. The single user
license is for a single developer on a single PC. The site license is for
any number of developers at a single location. The licensed version
contains fully commented C# source code for both the Windows Forms and the
web server image map controls and their supporting classes. Technical
support and bug fixes will be supplied to licensed users free of charge.
Once purchased, distribution of the assembly containing the controls with
your applications is royalty-free (see the enclosed license
agreement for full details).
Payment and Delivery
For fastest delivery, please choose a payment option below. Payment is
handled via PayPal and you will be e-mailed a URL within two (2) business
days that allows you to download the licensed version from this site. If
you would prefer to pay by an alternate method such as check or money
order, please contact the author directly at
Eric@EWoodruff.us.
Thank you!
NOTE: The download URL will be sent to the e-mail address on the
PayPal invoice. If you would like it sent to an alternate e-mail address,
please e-mail a note containing the alternate e-mail address at the same
time payment is made.
| 12/22/2006 |
2.0.0.0 - Created a .NET 2.0 version of the controls. Due
to some issues with the Visual Studio 2005 designers, the web controls and
Windows Forms controls now each reside in a separate assembly. Changes were
also made in the .NET 2.0 version to take advantage of some of the new
features in .NET 2.0:
- The
DrawImageEventHandler delegate has been removed. Use
the new generic EventHandler<DrawImageEventArgs> delegate
instead.
- The
ImageMapClickEventHandler delegate has been removed.
Use the new generic EventHandler<ImageMapClickEventArgs>
delegate instead.
- The base class for
ImageAreaCollection has been changed to
Collection<IImageArea>.
- The base class for
PointCollection has been changed to
Collection<Point>.
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| 11/28/2005 |
1.4.0.0 - Fixed up the web server image map control's use of
view state to handle dynamic image areas correctly. The demo has been updated
to include an example of using a dynamically created image area.
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| 12/31/2004 |
1.3.0.0 - Made significant improvements to the Windows Forms
Image Map control and the Coordinate Editor. See the help file for full
details.
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| 12/18/2004 |
1.2.0.0 - Fixed a bug in the use of custom attributes in the
web control (i.e. onmouseover and onmouseout handlers
on image areas). The web demos have been updated to include an example of
their use.
NOTE: If you use the Visual Studio designer to edit the
collection of image areas, custom attributes on the image area items will
be lost (i.e. things like onmouseover or other such attributes
that are not normal properties of the image area object). This appears to
be a bug in the designer as the same thing happens to ListItem
objects in controls such as the ListBox and
DropDownList. Use code to add custom attributes to the image
areas instead as show in the demo.
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| 10/30/2004 |
1.1.0.0 - Added a TagString property to the Web
Image Area controls so that the tag value could be set in the design-time HTML.
ASP.NET is unable to convert a value to an Object at runtime if assigned to
the Tag property in the design-time HTML. As such, use the
TagString property instead. The Tag property can be
used in code to assign values of any type to the tag value.
The default behavior of throwing an exception if the page's form control
cannot be found when post back image areas are used has been changed. If not
found, it now defaults to using element zero of the forms collection
(forms[0]). If you need to override this behavior and specify an
actual form ID, use the new FormId property on the first image map
control that appears on the page.
Added culture awareness where needed to the conversion to/from string values.
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| 07/26/2004 |
1.0.0.0 - Initial release. |
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