VB6 Controls Collection: How to find the index of a control?

[stillill]

Got a form with a control array called ctlTicketLine.

I want to completely remove an element from this array, but to do this I apparently have to delete the control's index property.

Can someone tell me how to do this? I can't seem to get the index of it from the Controls array.

thanks.

[chitty]

See

doesn't work with design time created controls though

[stillill]

Originally Posted by chitty

See

doesn't work with design time created controls though

Thanks, I'll have a look. It's a design-time created array though. Seems like a reasonable thing to do, but later my code is looking for an element I've unloaded. Will keep digging.

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[Chris Locke]

If you remove a control from the middle of the array, your array count will drop by one, but you still have to go through them all* to find out which one. (*the max you've had). You can use the tag property of control index 0 to maintain the highest index count.
You can also create a function to determine if a control exists. Just store the controls name into a temp variable, and wrap error checking around it. If it fails, that control doesn't exist. eg,

Function ffn_doesControlExist(ac_control As Control) As Boolean
    On Error GoTo ErrHandler
    Dim ls_name As String
    
    ls_name = ac_control.Name
    ffn_doesControlExist = True
    
    Exit Function

ErrHandler:
    Exit Function
    'used for debuggin'
    Resume
End Function

So, you can check if command1(2) exists by using:

if ffn_doesControlExist(command1(2)) = true then ...

etc.

I'll knock up a sample app to explain this, if you want...

[stillill]

Originally Posted by Chris Locke

If you remove a control from the middle of the array, your array count will drop by one, but you still have to go through them all* to find out which one. (*the max you've had). You can use the tag property of control index 0 to maintain the highest index count.
You can also create a function to determine if a control exists. Just store the controls name into a temp variable, and wrap error checking around it. If it fails, that control doesn't exist. eg,

Function ffn_doesControlExist(ac_control As Control) As Boolean
    On Error GoTo ErrHandler
    Dim ls_name As String
    
    ls_name = ac_control.Name
    ffn_doesControlExist = True
    
    Exit Function

ErrHandler:
    Exit Function
    'used for debuggin'
    Resume
End Function

So, you can check if command1(2) exists by using:

if ffn_doesControlExist(command1(2)) = true then ...

etc.

I'll knock up a sample app to explain this, if you want...

Thanks for the effort Chris, I appreciate it. Seems a bit longwinded to have to check if the control exists right enough. I thought I'd be able to use the Me.Controls.Remove method to remove one element of a control array.

For instance, when I Watch the Me.Controls collection, I can see my 3 elements are Item 111,112 and 113 in the collection (it's a busy form). I can't seem to reference them directly however so I can use the Remove method.

[Chris Locke]

Hmm. If you've 10 command buttons in an array (command1 in the above example, so command1(0), command1(1), command1(2), etc) you can remove one by simply using unload command1(5). Depends on the rest of your code, I suppose, but thats how I've done it in the past.