C# and Month Calendar, selecting multiple dates

Question

I am making a program that will help people "book" orders for a department in C#. They need to be able to choose multiple dates in different months.

I would prefer to have it so they can click a date, and then shift click another one to select all dates between those two, and control clicking as well, to do single selection/deselection. They have to be able to move between months while still retaining all the dates they clicked for the previous month, this way they can overview the dates they've selected to make it easier.

What is the best way to do this? Should I use Visual Studio's default month calendar or is there a more flexible one that exists?

Solution 1

You can make it work by detecting clicks on dates and then add or remove the clicked date from the bolded dates. Implement the MonthCalendar's MouseDown event:

private void monthCalendar1_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) {
  MonthCalendar.HitTestInfo info = monthCalendar1.HitTest(e.Location);
  if (info.HitArea == MonthCalendar.HitArea.Date) {
    if (monthCalendar1.BoldedDates.Contains(info.Time))
      monthCalendar1.RemoveBoldedDate(info.Time);
    else 
      monthCalendar1.AddBoldedDate(info.Time);
    monthCalendar1.UpdateBoldedDates();
  }
}

Just one problem with this, it flickers like a cheap motel. No fix for that.

Solution 2

The WinForms MonthCalendar supports selection of a Range, from Start to End but not the (de)selection of individual dates with Ctrl. So it seems it does not meet your requirements.

Just a quick note: If you resize the MonthCalendar it will show more months. Together with nobugz' answer that might give you a working solution.

Comments

[JDB]

I am using the WPF Toolkit for .NET 3.5, but I can set my Calendar's SelectionMode property to "MultipleRange" which allows for multiple ranges to be selected. The DisplayDateStart and DisplayDateEnd properties allow you to set the range of dates that can be selected (for example, setting your DisplayDateStart to 1/1/2010 would prevent the user from selecting a date before 1/1/2010)

[Napoli]

Interesting... there's no "SelectionMode" property for my monthCalendar object