How to identify whether visibility of the control is changed by user or not?

Question

My usercontrol inherits System.Windows.Forms.Control class. The following link describes the \"Visible\" property of control Control.Visible

Answer 1

All controls in windows forms internally maintain their state. Visibility is also one of the things they maintain in state. Because it helps to identify why visibility of the control was changed.

Control.Visible will return false if there is a control above your control or parent of your control is hidden. But value of Visible property in state will be false only if user set it to false.

Code:

        //Method to ensure the visibility of a control
        public bool DetermineVisibility(Control control)
        {
            //Avoid reflection if control is visible
            if (control.Visible)
                return true;

            //Find non-public GetState method of control using reflection
            System.Reflection.MethodInfo GetStateMethod = control.GetType().GetMethod("GetState", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic);

            //return control's visibility if GetState method not found
            if (GetStateMethod != null)     
                //return visibility from the state maintained for control
                return (bool)(GetStateMethod.Invoke(control, new object[] { 2 }));
            return false;
        }