How to Add Modal Box Like Waiting Cursor on WPF App

Question

In my WPF App, there are certain time consuming actions which are activated when the user clicks a button. What I would like to do is, show the User a Modal Box like Waiting Cursor, much like its done one Web Apps, to indicate that process is going on in the background. What kind of Controls do I have to achieve this?

Answer 1

Check out the Busy Indicator

Answer 2

You're not looking at much here. I'm not sure how you've designed your application, but for myself, I've created a class NavPage that extends the UserControl class and has a property Modal of type NavPage and a Close event.

So basically my NavPage control allows me to host other NavPag controls as modals within it. The Close function just closes the Page.

Here's how my template looks for the NavPage control.

<ControlTemplate x:Key="Fx_NavPage_ControlTemplate" TargetType="{x:Type fx:NavPage}">
    <Grid>
        <Border x:Name="TheContainer" CornerRadius="{TemplateBinding CornerRadius}" BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}">
            <ContentControl Content="{TemplateBinding Content}" />
        </Border>
        <Border x:Name="TheCover" CornerRadius="{TemplateBinding CornerRadius}" Background="#20000000" Visibility="Collapsed" />
        <ContentControl x:Name="TheModal" Content="{TemplateBinding Modal}" Visibility="Collapsed" />
    </Grid>
    <ControlTemplate.Triggers>
        <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Modal, RelativeSource={x:Static RelativeSource.Self}, Converter={StaticResource IsNullConverter}}" Value="False">
            <Setter TargetName="TheCover" Property="Visibility" Value="Visible" />
            <Setter TargetName="TheModal" Property="Visibility" Value="Visible" />
        </DataTrigger>
    </ControlTemplate.Triggers>
</ControlTemplate>

So basically I just have a Grid with a ContentControl (TheContainer), Border (TheCover) and another ContentControl (TheModal). Then I have a DataTrigger which checks if the value of the Modal property on the NavPage, and if its anything but null, it changes the visibility of TheCover and TheModal to visible. The cover is just a semitransparent Border control that stops the user from clicking controls in the main NavPage.

Hope this helps you out, or you could quite simply just use the BusyIndicator someone suggested above, I've never used it myself so can't give you any input there. If you decide to go this way and need help, let me now I can get more code for you.