Me.Controls help 1

[artyk]

Hi, everyone. I am fairly new to VB.Net, meaning I have done a couple of pretty simple apps. The one I am currently working on is quite a bit more complex, however.

What I have is a scheduling program that I need to be able to add controls to a form on the fly. I have a general idea of how I want it to work, but I'm not sure of the commands I need. The part I am working on, the user selects a day of the week from a combobox and the form is populated based on the table data. It works great, but I need it to check how many lines (controls to display the data) are on the form and add/subtract lines as needed.

I have the controls named such as "dtpStaffTimeEnd1" and I'm trying to set it up so that it searches the form for the control with the highest number so that I can determine if I need to add or subtract groups of controls. I was thinking something along the lines of Me.Controls.Find, but I've never used that before and was unsure of the correct usage.

If someone could point me in the right direction, I would be appreciative. Or if there is a better way to do what I'm trying to do I would obviously be open to that also.

Thanks!

 

[RiverGuy]

If you add the controls to a transparent panel, instead of the form itself, you can use something like MyPanel.Controls.Count to determine how many controls you currently have.

Here is one other suggestion:

* If you have an upper limit of controls, you might create them all and hide/unhide them as needed instead of creating/destroying everytime.

 

[artyk]

Thanks for the suggestions. There won't be an upper limit for this particular form. I had considered making one, but I would like to keep it as flexible as possible. There is also a Me.Controls.Count as well, but I was hoping I could isolate the number in the form name and use that and an array of the controls to find the highest number of the given control somehow.

 

[RiverGuy]

Also remember the .Tag property of the controls, where you can store extra information--for example, an integer. You could loop through the controls for the highest .Tag easier than splitting the string to get the number.

You can also keep a variable with the number of controls you have created to keep track of the count.

 

[artyk]

That's (the .tag) an excellent idea! Thanks, that seals it, that's what I will use. Thanks again!