A better way of managing a forms state?

I am new to Windows programming, as in my previous work I've mostly been involved with web technologies, and mostly in the backend. I have inherited a Winforms application, and one of my biggest nightmares is navigating through the endless states a form can be in.

To give you an example, a form has the state 'New' and 'Edit' depending on whether the user decided to Add or Edit a record. On this form, we have logic. If this texbox has a certain value, then these other textboxes are disabled, etc. This leads to endless chaining of these rules. So, a textbox's TextChanged event will influence another field. It in turn will fire X event that changes the state of other controls. It quickly devolves into a tangled mess that is impossible to maintain.

There has to be a better way... something 开发者_StackOverflow中文版simple and elegant that solves this problem. Any suggestions?

What I do is to have a single method called FormatControls(). In this method, I implement all the logic such as myTextbox.Enabled = mycheckBox.Checked and so on.

I call this method from my event handlers in the form, such as on checked changed, etc... I also call it when appropriate (ie, form newly loaded with no data, record loaded from database, etc). This has suited me well for many years now, it makes everything less complex.

You are correct, if you do not have a pattern in use it can turn into a too-complex thing.

You can try to use tha Application.Idle event to perform the enable disable logic and insulate this part from the business logic part.

Depending on what controls you have on your form, you might be able to do away with the separate textboxes and add/delete buttons and replace the whole works with a DataGrid.