7. Forms

• For example, to add a "File" menu to your Form, enter the following information into the Menu Editor:

Caption:    &File
Name:       mnuFile

• Click the "Next" button and then the indent button (right-arrow). On this Menu enter:

Caption:    &Open
Name:       mnuOpen

• Click "Next" again and add another Menu item:

Caption:    E&xit
Name:       mnuExit

• Now click the "OK" button to close the Menu Editor dialogue. You will notice that your Form now has a File menu with "Open" and "Exit" options.

• Create a new project in Visual Basic that displays a large form.
• Add the following Menus to your form:

• Close the Menu Editor dialogue and select the "Exit" Menu option that you created. The Form's Event Code View window will appear at the Event Method for that Menu option. The name of this Event depends on what you named the Menu.
• In this Event Method unload the form, as before (since this is the only Form that is running, this will actually end the program):

Private Sub mnuExit_Click()
    Unload Me
End Sub

• Create a new "Standard EXE" project in MicrosoftT Visual Basic.
• From the "Project" menu add one "MDI Form" and two "Forms"
• Open each of the Forms and use the Properties Window to change the "MDIChild" property to "True". Notice that the Form's icon changes in the Project Explorer window. This tells Visual Basic that these Forms are to be loaded into the MDI Form as child forms.
• On the MDI Form, add a single "File" menu in the same way as shown above.
• On Form1, add "File", "Edit" and "Help" menus as above. Don't add any menus to Form2.
• Double-click the MDI Form to open the Code View window at the Load Event Method. On load of this form, show both of the child forms as follows:

Private Sub MDIForm_Load()
    Form1.Show
    Form2.Show
End Sub

• Continue from the previous exercise, adding three Module-Level variables at the top of the MDI Form's code:

Dim frmOne As Form
Dim frmTwo As Form
Dim frmThree As Form

• This declares three variables of data type Form. In order to create an instance of an existing form, these variables must be Set to the master form. Insert the following lines into the MDI Form's code:

Private Sub MDIForm_Load()
    Set frmOne = New Form1
    Set frmTwo = New Form1
    Set frmThree = New Form1
    -- etc --

• Each of the instances of the original form (we used Form1 here) now exists as an object variable. Since the object is an exact replica of the original, it has a "Show" method, so we can load each of the three copies - complete the code as follows:

Private Sub MDIForm_Load()
    Set frmOne = New Form1
    Set frmTwo = New Form1
    Set frmThree = New Form1

    frmOne.Show
    frmTwo.Show
    frmThree.Show

    Form2.Show

End Sub

• Create a new "Standard EXE" project in Visual Basic.
• Draw a Frame control on the form. Now go into the Form's Resize Event method. Each time the Form is resized, we are going to programmatically resize the Frame control to match. Enter the following within the Resize Event:

Private Sub Form_Resize()
    If Me.Width < 1000 Then Me.Width = 1000     ' Limit the minimum width
    If Me.Height < 1000 Then Me.Height = 1000   ' Limit the minimum height
    Frame1.Left = 100
    Frame1.Top = 100
    Frame1.Width = Me.Width - 400
    Frame1.Height = Me.Height - 800
End Sub

• The Frame control is first positioned to a fixed Left and Top location (this is like the X and Y co-ordinates), then the width and height properties are set to match the Form's (with a margin of 400 for the width and 800 for the height).