Working with RadRotator

Updated on May 7, 2026

Properties

The following properties are specific to RadRotator:

Items

The Items collection can contain a wide array of RadElement types. To add to the collection at design time, click the Items property ellipses button to display the Rad Items Collection Editor. Use the Add split button to locate and select one of the available item types. In particular, RadImageItem wraps a standard Image object (look for the Image and ImageIndex properties of RadImageItem), and RadWebBrowserItem can be used to display a web page by specifying the Url property. For an example of how to use these properties, refer to the Getting Started article.

Running

Setting the Running property to true starts the animation. The default value is false.

AnimationFrames

This property controls the number of frames used to display a transition between items. Larger numbers of frames slow the animation and cause the transition to appear smoother. The default value is 10. The value has to be greater than 0.

Interval

Interval is the number of milliseconds between item displays. The default value is 2000.

LocationAnimation

This property controls the direction and distance of movement when an item is animated. The value is a SizeF with Width and Height components, each in the range [-1, 1]. The default value is (0, -1).

• A positive Width value causes the transition between items to move left. A negative value causes items to move right.
• A positive Height value causes the transition between items to move up. A negative value causes items to move down.
• A value of 1 or -1 means the item will be completely outside the visible area before the animation begins (for the incoming item) or after it ends (for the outgoing item).

OpacityAnimation

When set to true (the default), items become more transparent as they move off screen, while the item moving onscreen becomes opaque. The animation blends smoothly from one item to the other. When set to false, new items move over the top of old items without the fading effect.

CurrentIndex

Gets or sets the index of the currently displayed rotator item. When the property is set, a swap animation is performed between the old and the new item.

ShouldStopOnMouseOver

Gets or sets whether RadRotator stops rotating when the mouse hovers over the control. The default value is true.

DefaultItem

Gets or sets the RadItem that is displayed while the rest of the items are loading. The DefaultItem is not cycled through when the rotation starts. To have an initial item that participates in the rotation, add it to the Items collection and navigate to it by using the Goto method.

CurrentItem

Gets the currently displayed RadItem. This is a read-only property.

Methods

Start()

The Start method is equivalent to setting the Running property to true. You can call Start() without parameters or use the overload where the parameter takes a boolean. When the parameter is true, the animation starts immediately without waiting for the first interval to elapse.

The method returns true if the rotation started successfully and false if the Items collection is empty.

Stop()

Stops the rotation. If a swap animation is in progress, it will be completed before the StopRotation event fires.

Goto()

Initiates a swap animation between the current item and the item at the index specified by the index parameter. Pass -1 to navigate to the DefaultItem. Returns true on a successful swap.

GotoDefault()

Navigates to the DefaultItem. Equivalent to calling Goto(-1).

Previous()

Moves to the previous item in the Items collection. Returns true on success.

Next()

Moves to the next item in the Items collection. Returns true on success.

Events

ItemClicked

The ItemClicked event fires when an item in the rotator is clicked.

StartRotation, StopRotation

The StartRotation event fires when the Running property is set to true or the Start() method is called. StartRotation passes CancelEventArgs, which allows you to prevent the rotation from starting. StopRotation fires when Running is set to false or when the Stop() method is called.

BeginRotate, EndRotate

The BeginRotate and EndRotate events fire just before and after a transition between rotator items. BeginRotate passes a BeginRotateEventArgs parameter containing the following properties:

• From—Gets the index of the previous rotator item.
• To—Gets or sets the index of the upcoming rotator item. You can change this value to redirect the rotation to a different item.
• Cancel—Set to true to prevent the upcoming rotator item from displaying.