Drawing Rectangle in Measurement Studio Chart Using the Cursor

In this article, you will find a tutorial and an example of the C# code for drawing a rectangle using the mouse in Measurement Studio. 
You can modify the example the way it suits your needs more.

Note: The example which was modifyed is one delivered with Measurement Studio.

 

Please follow the steps below: 

1. Open a standard example sheep by measurement studio 

                                                                                        

1. Add the code from the attached file under the MainForm       

 
                                      

1. Navigate all the way down on the code and leave the cursor at the line between 333-335 (add more lines as shown in the picture) 

1. Go to the ManiForm.cs[Design]*, we now need to add events so please choose the Event button from the Properties section in the right lower corner: 

1. We are going to manually add events MouseDown, MouseMove, MouseUp, Paint. After double-clicking on the event it will show up on the code lines. 

 

1. After, just add the GetRect() for getting the rectangle on the plot: 

1. Build the code and start the program. 
2. Now you'd be able to draw the rectangle using the cursor. 
3. If you would need more rectangles there would be a need on modifying the code for it.

Rectangle rect;
Point LocationXY;
Point LocationX1Y1;

bool IsMouseDown = false;


private void sampleWaveformGraph_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
        {
            IsMouseDown = true; //If this event has occured so this variable is true

            LocationXY = e.Location; //Ge the starting location of point X and Y
        }

        private void sampleWaveformGraph_MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
        {
            if (IsMouseDown == true)
            {
                LocationX1Y1 = e.Location;
            }
        }

        private void sampleWaveformGraph_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
        {
            if (IsMouseDown == true)
            {
                LocationX1Y1 = e.Location;

                IsMouseDown = false;
            }
        }

        private void sampleWaveformGraph_Paint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e)
        {
            if (rect != null)//Check if rectangle is not a null
            {
                e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(Pens.Green, GetRect());
            }
        }

        Rectangle GetRect()
        {
            rect = new Rectangle();

            rect.X = Math.Min(LocationXY.X, LocationX1Y1.X);

            rect.Y = Math.Min(LocationXY.Y, LocationX1Y1.Y);

            rect.Width = Math.Abs(LocationXY.X - LocationX1Y1.X);

            rect.Height = Math.Abs(LocationXY.Y - LocationX1Y1.Y);

            return rect;
        }

Next Steps

1) If you want to delate the rectangles you've drawn you can add a chart event for example to the delete button, and then make the top left corner equal to the bottom left corner, hence making the rectangle 0 in size which will make it disappear:
 
2) If you need multiple rectangles you can create a list or an array of rectangles. For a certain event (mouse double click, button press, whatever) he can add a new rectangle to the list.
A nice example of the code can be found in the  [EXTERNAL]Drawing Multiple Rectangles c#  question.

3)We would recommend dedicating a keypress event for selecting the active rectangle which you can draw, delete, resize, etc. So only the active rectangle is affected by any mouse or keyboard event like deletion, but every rectangle in the array gets drawn at each iteration. 
For example for each press of the TAB key, you can select the i+1 rectangle in your array or list it as active. In order to distinguish the active rectangle you can use a separate color to draw it: 

Or you can use Annotations (each rectangle will have a label, e.g. 1, 2, 3...) and a numeric indicator to tell you which rectangle is the active one.