Iterating through all controls on the form with VB.NET

by Irina Medvinskaya | Feb 08, 2007 10:47:00 PM

Tags: Microsoft development tools, Programming languages, Irina Medvinskaya, TextBox, cControl InMe.Controls, Microsoft Visual Basic.Net, Visual Basic Tips Newsletter

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Takeaway: Irina Medvinskaya presents a simple way to change all the controls on a form in runtime with VB.NET.

If you've ever had to change all the controls on a form in runtime, you know how tedious it can be to modify the controls one by one. Here's a simple way to perform this useful function with VB.NET.

Controls collection

The form maintains a collection of controls that you can utilize to loop through in order to change a certain property that you want to update in runtime.

For example, add two textboxes to a form and add the following code:

Private Sub SetControls()
������� Dim cControl As Control
������� For Each cControl InMe.Controls
����������� If (TypeOf cControl Is TextBox) Then
��������������� cControl.Text = "abc"
����������� End If
������� Next cControl
��� End Sub

Figure A shows what you will see when you run the code.

Figure A

In the example, I define the variable cControl as a Control object. I then create a for loop that will check all the controls on the form to see if the type of the control is a TextBox. For all the TextBox controls, I set its Text property to value "abc"; so, the Text property would be set to "abc" for as many TextBox controls as you have on the form. You can follow a similar procedure for setting other properties or use it for different control types.

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