Make all Controls on a Form read-only at once

Question

Does anyone have a piece of code to make all Controls (or even all TextBoxes) in a Form which is read-only at once without having to set every Control to read-only individua

Answer 1

You should be able to write yourself a utility function to do this. You can iterate over the form’s controls and then each control’s child controls recursively. For example:

public static void SetEnableOnAllControls(Control parentControl, bool enable)
{
    parentControl.Enabled = enable;
    foreach (Control control in parentControl.Controls)
        SetEnableOnAllControls(control, enable);
}

[...]

// inside your form:
SetEnableOnAllControls(this, false);

This doesn’t take care of ToolStrips, which aren’t controls. You could write a separate, similar method for those.

Notice that the above disables the form itself too. If you don’t want that, try this:

public static void SetEnableOnAllChildControls(Control parentControl, bool enable)
{
    foreach (Control control in parentControl.Controls)
    {
        control.Enabled = enable;
        SetEnableOnAllChildControls(control, enable);
    }
}

If you really meant the ReadOnly property, which is only relevant for TextBoxes, try this:

public static void SetReadOnlyOnAllControls(Control parentControl, bool readOnly)
{
    if (parentControl is TextBoxBase)
        ((TextBoxBase) parentControl).ReadOnly = readOnly;
    foreach (Control control in parentControl.Controls)
        SetReadOnlyOnAllControls(control, readOnly);
}