Disable Painting of the VScrollbar in a System.Windows.Forms.RichTextBox

Question

I have a custom control inherited from RichTextBox. This control has the ability to "disable" rich text editing. I achive this by just setting the Rtf property to the text property during the TextChanged event.

this is how my code looks like:

        private bool lockTextChanged;
        void RichTextBox_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            // prevent StackOverflowException
            if (lockTextChanged) return;

            // remember current position
            int rtbstart = rtb.SelectionStart;
            int len = rtb.SelectionLength;


            // prevent painting                
            rtb.SuspendLayout();

            // set the text property to remove the entire formatting.
            lockTextChanged = true;
            rtb.Text = rtb.Text;
            rtb.Select(rtbstart, len);
            lockTextChanged = false;

            rtb.ResumeLayout(true);
      }

That worked well. However in a large text with like 200 lines the controls jitters (you see the first lines of text for the wink).

To prevent that from happening I filter the WM_PAINT between SuspendLayout() and ResumeLayout()

    private bool layoutSuspended;
    public new void SuspendLayout()
    {
        layoutSuspended = true;
        base.SuspendLayout();
    }

    public new void ResumeLayout()
    {
        layoutSuspended = false;
        base.ResumeLayout();
    }

    public new void ResumeLayout(bool performLayout)
    {
        layoutSuspended = false;
        base.ResumeLayout(performLayout);
    }

    private const int WM_PAINT = 0x000F;
    protected override void WndProc(ref System.Windows.Forms.Message m)
    {
        if (!(m.Msg == WM_PAINT && layoutSuspended))
            base.WndProc(ref m);

    }

that did the trick, the RichTextBox isn't jittering anymoe.
That's what I wanted to achive, except one thing:
The scrollbar is still jittering everytime I type text to my control.

Now my question: Does anyone have a clue for me how to prevent the scrollbar from redrawing during Suspend/Resume Layout?

Hans Passant Hans Passant · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-21T12:07:35

SuspendLayout() isn't going to have an effect, there are no child controls inside an RTB that need to be arranged. RTB is missing the Begin/EndUpdate() methods that most controls have, although it supports it. It suspends painting, although I'm not so sure it suspends updates to the scrollbar. Add them as follows:

public void BeginUpdate() {
  SendMessage(this.Handle, WM_SETREDRAW, (IntPtr)0, IntPtr.Zero);
}
public void EndUpdate() {
  SendMessage(this.Handle, WM_SETREDRAW, (IntPtr)1, IntPtr.Zero); 
}

// P/invoke declarations
private const int WM_SETREDRAW = 0xb;
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
private extern static IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int msg, IntPtr wp, IntPtr lp);

The better way to prevent the user from editing text is to set the ReadOnly property to True. Removing the scrollbar entirely is possible too by overriding CreateParams.

Disable Painting of the VScrollbar in a System.Windows.Forms.RichTextBox

1 Answers