Which Control To use?
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I am working on a tool for Data Services, and decided to create the tool as a VB.NET windows application. I am not a VB .Net developer, but know enought to get by, though I struggle with the controls because I've never used them (I have used VB 6 controls). The purpose of the App is to Update an online questionnaire, the questionnaire has branching...etc. So far, I open a form that Loads two drop down boxes. 1st drop down loads companies, second drop drown is bound to questionnaires for the company selected. You then select the questionnaire being updated. Then I use Common Dialog, open file, to select an Excel spread sheet that has the new questionnaire stucture, with new questions. You then click on "Update" and the excel spreadsheet is loaded into a datatable, and the existing "Active" questionnaire is pulled from the DB into another datatable. I then do a row by row comparison against the spreadsheet and the existing version comparing things like question text, answer label, incorrectness of question....among other things, in order to determine if there are new questions being submitted, other wise, I want to use the existing question. some of these take human interaction in order to determine if the question is new. Although I scrub the excel data down, there are still things you cant possible take into account. So after doing all my comparisons, in instead of popping up a message box every time somethiing is different (there are hunderds of rows and this woudl be annoying) I would like to mark (flag) differences and then when comparison is complete, open up a new form with a with a check box by each possible new question, so the user can validate, by going through and checking what IS actually new. What control should I use? A listview? I want a checkbox on the left. I would also like to change the background color of the part that has actually changed. Say for instance, the question text changed, or the Answer text changed, of if the incorrectness changed, then mark that. Thanks in advance for time in effort in this matter. Also, any good resources on the recommended control would be gread. Shawn
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I am working on a tool for Data Services, and decided to create the tool as a VB.NET windows application. I am not a VB .Net developer, but know enought to get by, though I struggle with the controls because I've never used them (I have used VB 6 controls). The purpose of the App is to Update an online questionnaire, the questionnaire has branching...etc. So far, I open a form that Loads two drop down boxes. 1st drop down loads companies, second drop drown is bound to questionnaires for the company selected. You then select the questionnaire being updated. Then I use Common Dialog, open file, to select an Excel spread sheet that has the new questionnaire stucture, with new questions. You then click on "Update" and the excel spreadsheet is loaded into a datatable, and the existing "Active" questionnaire is pulled from the DB into another datatable. I then do a row by row comparison against the spreadsheet and the existing version comparing things like question text, answer label, incorrectness of question....among other things, in order to determine if there are new questions being submitted, other wise, I want to use the existing question. some of these take human interaction in order to determine if the question is new. Although I scrub the excel data down, there are still things you cant possible take into account. So after doing all my comparisons, in instead of popping up a message box every time somethiing is different (there are hunderds of rows and this woudl be annoying) I would like to mark (flag) differences and then when comparison is complete, open up a new form with a with a check box by each possible new question, so the user can validate, by going through and checking what IS actually new. What control should I use? A listview? I want a checkbox on the left. I would also like to change the background color of the part that has actually changed. Say for instance, the question text changed, or the Answer text changed, of if the incorrectness changed, then mark that. Thanks in advance for time in effort in this matter. Also, any good resources on the recommended control would be gread. Shawn
I don't think you really have any options that will support everything you describe. There is a CheckedListBox, but no control over the colors. You might could write enough code to make the intrinsic NET DataGrid control do what you want to do, but it would take a lot of work. What you really need for this sounds like probably a 3rd party grid, like ComponentOne (the old Apex True Grids) - they generally give you a lot more control than you have over Microsoft controls. This would have been a lot easier to do in VB6 because you could create your own custom row control ocx and use the DataRepeater to make it into a grid. VB.NET does not provide a DataRepeater but you may still be able to import the DataRepeater into a NET project and do it that way.