I'm having a heck of a time figuring this out.



I have a control that is within a tab, that is in toostripcontainer. I want to programmatically place a control (a label) such that the upper left corner of the label is right below the controls lower left corner. Now this is trivial if they are both in the same container, in this case the tab page. Alas, that is not the case. The label is in the form's control collection, not the tabs.



My first try was to get the point that is at the lower left of the control in the tab, translate it to screen coordinates, then translate it back to client coordinates, but relative to the form:







This typically results in the label being too low and too far right.



Then I thought maybe the PointToClient relative to the form was including the borders and header, but when setting the location, these were not. So I attempted to take this into consideration by comparing the Size of the form to the ClientSize. I figured the X difference \ 2 should be the left border width (or close) and maybe the Y difference minus the border width would be the header height. Alas, this degraded into finding magic numbers...which changed on every form/layout.



So, if you've followed this far, I'm hoping you can help me figure out how to retrieve a location relative to the form itself, of a control buried within other control(s).



Thanks!

Woot, glad you got it

I was having a similar problem, in that I wanted to place a borderless form just under a label when it was clicked, and couldn't get the true screen co-ordinates of the control. Here's a recursive method as suggested by Peter to do that. It doesn't take into account borderwidths, but it gives the location of the control on the screen.

I had to do this just the other day, and I ended up doing it like this:

To find the bottom left corner:

Point pt = this.myLabel.PointToScreen( new Point( 0, this.myLabel.Height ) );
BorderlessForm f = new BorderlessForm( );
f.StartPosition = FormStartPosition.Manual;
f.Location = pt;
f.Show( );

Maybe that will help.  It gets the screen coordinates with respect to the label (since the method was called on the label), so you need the left edge with respect to the label (0), and you need the bottom edge with respect to the label (Height).