Chris's Event Programming with Visual Basic course.

Contents

Introduction Conventions Starting VB3 The development environment Help Documentation The "On-line" Tutorial Starting a new project Making an application Working with Forms Modal forms Multiple Document Interface (MDI) Building the interface Menus

Tool Bars & Control Arrays Building a Control Array Z Order Custom controls Handling Data Input Boxes Message Boxes Error Trapping The Data Manager Data Aware Components Debugging code Compilation of code

Tool Bars & Control Arrays
Tool bars can be attached to forms in two ways; either by provision of a custom control or by the building of a control array.

Building a Control Array

Arrays of Most controls can be built, in our example we will build an array consisting of 3 image boxes. Drag a picture box onto Form1, this will be the container for our array. Set it’s Align property to 1, this fixes it below the menu bar, then, drag an image box onto the picture box. From the Edit Menu, choose copy, then choose paste. You are prompted to choose if you want to build an array, click the Yes button, then paste a third image box onto the form. The controls all now share the same name (the array name) and are indexed, e.g. Image1(0), Image1(1) etc. The images can all be aligned below the menu for form1 and ,using the picture property for each image, an icon can be ascribed to each element of the array (I chose Flags of the world). To give our form some functionality, add a text box, Text1,  with the default value for text blank. The design should resemble that below:-
 
Now the control array is coded to control the output in the text box, as follows:-

Sub Image1_Click (index As Integer)
Select Case index
Case 0
text1.Text = "Canada"
Case 1
text1.Text = "France"
Case 2
text1.Text = "Germany"
End Select
End Sub

When this is now run, the tool bar controls the output to the text field.
 
 
 

Visual Basic and all other Microsoft products mentioned in this series are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation.