To illustrate what I'm asking, let's say I have a custom TextBox that has 2 modes. Mode 1 only allows numbers, and mode 2 only allows dates in a particular format.
Using a class module I can create this custom TextBox, and I can use a loop when the userform initialises to set which TextBoxes are custom.
What I'd like to happen is have the custom TextBox, or what ever custom control I want, show up in the toolbox. And I also want its custom properties, if they exist, to show up in the property window.
So far, I've been unable to find a way to do this. In fact, I've been unable to find out if it's even possible. It seems, to me anyway, that it's something that should be possible, but maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. If it's possible I'd really appreciate being pointed to a resource.
Let's start with a confession: I came from a VB6 background, and I'm accustomed to coding within the events of objects on a form, and as such my code for events ends up in somewhat random order in the code window. With this habit, it's never been very important to remember the names of controls (although I name them well)... I just double click on a button in the design view, which brings me straight to the code for that control's primary event. If I forget the name of a control, I click it and view properties. It's not a habit I've moved away from.
Well, now this is catching up to me. Using VS Express 2013, I have a form that contains a HUGE number of containers-within-containers, labels, buttons, and other doohickeys. I ported my code from VS.NET Express 2008 where this wasn't a problem. But now the act of selecting any control in the design view takes around 10 seconds before I can view its properties. If I drag to resize a control, and another 10 seconds passes before I can select another control. It makes designing this form nearly impractical.
In this particular project, I'm using use a tab control (which is never visible to the user) to design many "screens" which each contain panels full of controls. The panels for each "screen" are moved out of the tabs and docked into the main form as requested by the user changing screens. (I'm using the term "screen" to mean a window full of controls, usually maximized.)
Within the same project, a simple modal password-change form isn't slow to edit controls visually, even if the complex form is still visible in the IDE.
My question is in three parts:
First, what the heck is it spending all that time doing?
Second, is there a setting I can tweak to improve the speed?
Third, should I give up on trying to speed it up as-is, and move each "screen" into its own form for design purposes to avoid this slowness? (It's a lot of work to do that now... see next paragraph.)
Thus far I have avoided separating "screens" onto separate forms because I don't want a new window to come up when users change screens, and because code for the controls in one screen may affect the properties of controls on other screens... In such cases I prefer not to write out
form.doohickey.text = "blah"
..but rather keep it as ...
doohickey.text = "blah"
I'm using VB but I don't think this question is VB-specific.)
First off, I feel your pain. I have a management section of the application that I'm writing and I'm using a TabControl as well. I have 10 tabs so far and I've only added controls to about 4-5 tabs. I just added up the controls I have and there are about 360 controls so far on this one form and the designer file is ~3300 lines long. Currently anytime I change a property value of one of the controls or go to save the Designer, it takes about 3-4 seconds each time. I have a fairly decent machine; i5-3320M, 8GB RAM, intel 330 SSD, and it still takes a bit for it to do things within the tabControl. It also takes FOREVER to open and load the designer on that form...
What I've found is that it is easier to open a new instance of Visual Studio, create a test application, add a TabControl with the same properties, and design a new tab page from there. When I'm done I do a copy-paste into my actual project. This works great except for the few custom controls I've written in my main application project, I just have to sit and wait while adding them.
I'm now answering my own question. This is the approach I've ended up using, and it helps a lot...
My overall goal was to have an interface that didn't present a lot of windows, but still presented many different "screens".
I used to place all the different controls of different "screens" on separate panels, which were each contained in separate tabs of an invisible TabControl. I would then move those panels to my main form as needed by changing their Parent property of each panel as needed. The only problem with this is that the Winforms designer got ridiculously slow as the number of controls on a form increased into the hundreds.
Now, I am now designing each "screen" as a separate form, each of which contains a panel whose Dock property = Fill. Such a panel contains everything else on the form. The form itself never becomes visible.
As needed for to view various screens, I execute:
ScreenForm.Panel1.Parent = Mainform
...or, depending on how I lay it out...
ScreenForm.Panel1.Parent = Mainform.PanelXYZ
...I also either unload or hide any panels which already exist in the panel's new container.
I was GLADLY SURPRISED to find that the code for the various events of the controls contained in the panels would still run, because such code exists in the first form's file, not the displayed form's file. Luckily, it seems I was wrong. Event code follows the control itself. I can copy/paste not only controls, but also their corresponding event code to new forms for easier development and a faster Winforms designer.
All of this is similar to a MDI interface with maximized windows, but no title bar or [X] is displayed.
Essentially I'm doing everything as I did before, except using separate forms with panels instead of separate tabs with panels. The WinForms designer is much quicker because there aren't so many controls on any form.
I think I accidently found a workaround for saving a lot of time when changing the name of a control on a overpopulated container/project. Before you change the name, toggle False/True the "Generate Member" property of the control you want to rename(I believe you can also locate this under the "Name" property). This adds a few more clicks to the procedure but saves a lot of time. My not-yet-finished project has over 4000 controls and multiple forms and some of them are very "heavy" (10 - 20 seconds to normally change the name of a control). This, of course, don't help in anyway with the loading time of the project (about 35 seconds for me) but I can live with it. Let me know if this works for you too.
I'm a rookie at VBA(Excel) but I know some OOP stuff from java. What I want to do is extend the class MSForms.TextBox to add my own constructors and properties. I've tried using the implements keyword but my class won't compile. It would also be helpful to add these fields into some kind of container variable since they're arranged in a 9x9 pattern. Here's what I want my custom textbox to do. (It's for a game)
I need to be initiate it and place it on the form and put initial text into the box based on what is passed to the constructor. I also would like to have it check the values at runtime with an event to make sure they comply with the game rules. If it does not comply I would like to change the background color to red.
I'm able to do all of this when I just make a bunch of form controls the old fashioned way and use a sub controlled by a button to check the text box values.
Any help on extending classes would be much appreciated.
Thanks
I don't think you can do that in VBA. I would keep two arrays, one array of TextBox and one array of a new class representing your extended properties. Then you keep them in sync. e.g. Textbox #71 and extended properties #71.
You can look at the following link for making and working with control arrays.
http://www.siddharthrout.com/index.php/2018/01/15/vba-control-arrays/
How do I set a number in a up/down box then press a button to show me a second form with the amount of fields (like labels with text boxes) defined in the up/down box? I'm new to programming so try to explain in really simple terms if you can. Thanks
Code based solution you can implement now
Container controls in VB.Net inherit usually inherit from Panel control which owns a collection by name Children.
You can add dynamically created controls to this collection to create the second form.
Complex but technically sound solution
Invest sometime to learn XAML and create XAML templates to this job for you. Refer the link here which solves same problem in C#.
One of the controls needed in my xulrunner application is an autocompleting text box which allows the user to type a search term, then looks up completions in an array of objects (each having a generated UUID, canonical name, a list of search terms gleaned from related data, etc.) and allows the user to select just one. Currently I'm using a textbox element of type="autocomplete" and a Javascript custom search component, and it is successfully prefix searching all the search terms and providing completions below the text field, in the customary fashion.
The catch is that I'm not interested in the possibly non-unique label but the object from which the label came, and I can't see any way of passing the object or even any out-of-band UUID back into document land without modifying the XBL or rolling my own control from scratch. Essentially I'm seeking to do what could have been done in HTML with the option[value] attribute. I can't use the built-in type-to-search effect of a standalone menulist because I need to prefix search multiple fields of the object. Any recommendations? Thanks in advance.
I ended up rolling my own as a listbox inside a panel next to a textbox. Even composed into an XBL binding, this was less effort than I'd spent working with the built-in autocomplete textbox and trying to force it to handle what it wasn't intended to handle.