I have this small table in ORACLE where I want to keep colors:

COLOR_ID COLOR_DESC
0........White
1........Blue
2........Green
3........Salmon

I know I can use:
System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.FromWin32(&HFFFFFF&)
and &HFFFFFF& gives me White color (&HFF0000& gives me Blue, etc.)

I want to keep colors somehow in my data base to avoid Select Case statements or a bunch of IF statements in my code.

Two questions:
1. Is that the best way to approach colors?
2. How can I keep Colors in data base? What format should the column be? String? Integer?

Have fun.

---- Andy

What about if you add a string field named ColourValue in your table that will keep the value of each colour as &HFFFFFF& for example???
I disagree with integer type... you can convert the type of the field if you need it in your code. You don't have to remove COLOR_DESC field because it makes you clear which value of colour corresponds to the proper colour. The what you will do is to retrieve the value of the field you want each time from your database and you will achieve it via a sql query for example select ColourValue from colours where Colour_Desc = "Blue" you will store the result of the query to a variable. You can use a combo box with the colours you want blue, green, white, etc and if you can compare the value of combobox with the result of query.

Private Sub combo_SelectedIndexChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles combo.SelectedIndexChanged
dim colour, tempColour as string
colour = combo.Items.Item(combo.SelectedIndex))
' here you will put your query and your code to open your recordset etc... I give you the query.
tempColour = 'select ColourValue from Colours where Colour_Desc=' & colour
System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.FromWin32(tempColour)
end sub
so you will get the colour you want each time without use if, or select case statement. Hope it helps. Have fun

You can get all the known colors to a combobox, listbox or an array

Zameer Abdulla

Antzelinaki,

Your code:
System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.FromWin32(tempColour)
gives me an error: Conversion from string "&H00FFFFFF&" to type 'Integer' is not valid.

Have fun.

---- Andy

If Integer it wants, the Integer it gets:

I have found the equivalents as Integers:


And it works

I just may drop COLOR_VALUE column...

Have fun.

---- Andy

you can use the val function to convert string to integer too!!!!