wfQuery

WinForms "port" of jQuery.
VERY MUCH PROOF-OF-CONCEPT. DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION.

Why?

Why not? It won't be terribly useful to many people. But for the occasional person that needs to do a LOT of UI work at runtime, it might just be a life-saver.

Also, I like the jQuery syntax. I wanted to see if I could bring that ease of use to WinForms.

Syntax

Obviously js syntax is not 100% portable to c# - nor would you want it to be. But I've tried to do my best to keep it as close as possible.
I would have liked to access the query selector object via the $ variable name, but c# does not allow that name.

Initialization

wfQuery operates on a single Control per instance of the wfQuery class. Remember, Form derives from Control.

After your control is fully loaded (e.g. after Form.InitializeComponent() is done), you can initialize a basic implementation like so:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using wfQuery;

public partial class MainForm : Form {
  
    private wfQuery.wfQuery _ = null;
  
    public MainForm() {
    	InitializeComponent();
		
		_ = new wfQuery.wfQuery(this);
    }
}

Query Selectors

Selectors are currently very limited. There are two kinds

• Class selectors - select all items of a given Type. e.g. .TextBox
• Name selectors - select an item of a given name. e.g. #textBox2

You may include multiple selectors in a query by separating them with commas:

_[".TextBox, .Button"]

Property manipulation

Properties can be queried or manipulated via the .Attr method of the query results:

// This example will recieve all the TextBox.Text property values on the Form in an array.  
var values = _[".TextBox"].Attr("Text");

// This example sets all the TextBox.Text property values to "Hello World.".
_[".TextBox"].Attr("Text", "Hello World.");

Event handling

Arguable one of the most useful features of jQuery is its event handling.
You can achieve much the same thing using wfQuery:

// Hook up a button click handler to all buttons on the form
// that changes the clicked button's background color to Green.
_[".Button"].On("Click", (s, args) => {
    _[s].Attr("Color", Color.Green);
});

As you can see, there's a little work to be done here. It would be nice if s were of type Control rather than Object.

Property Resolvers

Property resolvers do just what their name implies. They are the DNS of property names. Given a property name and a Type, a Property Resolver is responsible for returning (or setting) the correct value. They also implement the property lookup symantics.
For instance, the included ReflectionPropertyResolver reflects over each object to find the requested property. On the other hand, the included ReflectionCachePropertyResolver caches any uncached Type structures (properties) the first time it encounters one. Subsequent requests for a property on that Type are fulfilled from the cache. This Property Resolver trades memory for cpu time.

Fluent API

wfQuery sports a shiney fluent API model. For instance:

//	Select all TextBoxes except for the one named "textBox2".
//	Set all items background color to Blue
//  Add a click event handler that will change the clicked item's background color to Red.
_[".TextBox"]
.Not("#textBox2")
.Attr("BackColor", Color.Blue)
.On("Click", (s, args) => {
	_[s].Attr("BackColor", Color.Red);
});

Now what?

Well, now I'll continue to work on this project in my spare time. I have a ton of improvements in mind and will take them one at a time.
I welcome all constructive criticism and feedback. Feature requests will be taken - but I make no guarantees about if or when I can fulfil them. This is open source, so please feel free to send me pull requests. This is also my first GitHub-hosted project. I've never run an open source project before. So that aspect is quite new to me. I welcome input on that as well.