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Today's guest blogger is Pavlo Pedan of ARGO Business Corp. He has 15 years of experience with Access and has a great site of tips at http://sites.google.com/site/msaccesscode/.
Some people do not like having ComboBoxes on a form because of drop-down buttons. Microsoft offers a solution here, but this approach does not work for a datasheet view – the drop-down button shows up when the ComboBox gets the focus.
Some people do not like ComboBoxes because the control requires some time to be populated from its row source. The row source could be remote and/or could be based on complex calculations. On the other hand, we actually need selection features of ComboBox only while editing respective field. Often we do not need all this overhead while simply navigating through records (unless we want to see data from a different column of the ComboBox).
While a ComboBox can be populated dynamically while entering symbols (see this great article from Allen Browne), the other approach is to get rid of the ComboBox itself while just displaying records and get it involved only when necessary.
Please have a look at my short video demo and download the VirtualComboBoxDemo sample database here.
When left-clicked or Alt+Down is pressed, a pop-up non-modal form that contains only one ComboBox shows up exactly over the TextBox. The text part (with or without a dropdown button) can be hidden or made visible, and can be made to use the AutoCorrect feature or not (see the code for details). This approach works for both Form and Datasheet views. Not much VBA programming is required. The ComboBox "converts" back to a TextBox if you press ESC, Tab or Shift+Tab, or when you click somewhere on a main form. This emulates natural ComboBox behaviour.
So now we have a form with TextBoxes only! When we need ComboBox, it appears on-the-fly and disappears when we are done with selection. This has been tested with Access 2007.
The usage of the clsControlLayout class is explained here.
Comments: (2) Collapse
Nice. Just a point of note, my company, OpenSpan, can take a textbox (or pretty much any object) and pop up an in-context combo-box, listbox, grid or any new control type (even launch a new app) and add any additional business logic around it, all at runtime, even if you don't own the source code. Albeit MS Access, a Web App, Java App, SAAS or Cloud apps or whatever. Drag and drop designer, no code or VBA even!
A very useful trick. I'm often reluctant to use comboboxes in continuous forms as the drop-down button is always displayed and it clutters the interface. With this, you can get pretty creative and add interesting functionalities to the pop-up form. Definitely a keeper.
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