Visual Basic Tutorial
File
Handling - Form Design Ideas
Objectives
This guide will help you
to: -
- with ideas on designing a form to display records.
Introduction
Ways of Viewing Records in a
Form
You should have worked through the
first two file handling tutorials before
attempting this one.
This tutorial give you ideas on how
to display records in a form in a user-friendly way.
In the previous file handling tutorial we ended up with a form that
allowed a user to read data from a data file. The problem with the
form (shown below) is that it does NOT allow a user to choose a particular
record to view.
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The user has to start at the first record and look through the rest one at a
time in sequence.
This is not very user friendly.
What if you have a lot of records and want to view say the 20th one? |
Perhaps a form like the one below would be more user
friendly.
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This form allows a user to browse back and forth viewing different records.
You can download my record.txt
file and form (including the code)
to try it out.
There is quite a lot of code in this one so it may appear difficult.
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Or perhaps a form like this would be just as suitable.
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This form allow a user to choose the record to display using a drop-down
combo box.
You can download my record.txt
file and form (including the code)
to try it out.
There is not so much code in this one.
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Here is one last possibility.
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This form allow a user to choose the record to display using a list box.
This is similar to the combo box form.
You can download my record.txt
file and form (including the code)
to try it out.
There is not so much code in this one either.
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We can see that there are many different form designs to
choose from. The last three forms are much more user friendly than the
first one.
The coding to make these forms work is quite difficult
for your level. If you really want to use something similar in your
own assignment I suggest you choose which type of file-handling form you
like from the three shown above and download my code for it.
Study the code and when you feel you understand it, try to
change it for your own file-handling form in your assignment.
Fini
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