Alternatives to Designer Studio

The Designer Studio is nice, but there's no feature to export your design to the corresponding VB code.  This would be a nice feature request to submit.

Like you, I didn't want to manage all those XCB files, so I just create all my menus in code.  It's not as bad as you might think.  You may want to use the Designer Studio to help you "plan" your menu system.  After that, the code is pretty easy to create.

I've never tried using more than one CommandBars instance on a single form, but I have used multiple instances on different forms within the same application (no problems there).  Typically, you can create multiple toolbars or popup menus that are all hosted from the same CommandBars instance.

The intended way to enable/disable controls is in the 'Update' event for CommandBars.  This event is fired to update a command before it is displayed or accessed (or periodically fired for toolbar controls that are always displayed).

As for getting help, the best resource will be the sample projects.  If you have questions that can't be answered by the supplied documentation or projects, just post your questions here.  Codejock monitors these forums pretty closely and will typically give you feedback in a reasonable amount of time.

If you load them with the UI then you won't have to add them again, If you add them via code then you must include the image files with your app as they aren't compiled in the exe.

The CommandBar Icon sample illustrates how to add icons using the UI.  You will need to look at the tutorial for this sample to see how this is done.

The short verion:
Both hot and disabled icons (and "checked" icons in next verion) are created automatically when you add icons to the ImageManage (both by code and throught the UI).  So you only need to add a hot or disabled icon if you want to use a custom icon when the control is disabled or hot.

Take a look at the Outlook 2003 sample, this sample illustrates how to load images via code.  In the sample, all the icons are stored in a bitmap file and loaded at the same time. 

Then I have posed on this topic before in the forums:
https://forum.codejock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=763& ;KW=imagemanager

After a few hit and misses, I was able to load icons fairly easily.  Using an existing resource file to store the image works fine (and also avoids have to reload/duplicate).

I continue to have a problem briefly mentioned earlier:

We have a VB6 form which hosts a fairly complex series of multiple tabs/sub tabs, etc.  I am using the codejock tabcontrol for this purpose.  A few of these different tabs require a control to help the user navigate through some database records.  Because I can't figure out how you would create say, 6 different toolbars from one instance of the CommandBar instance AND have each toolbar show up on a different tab, I have instead tried dropping the CommandBar control in six different picturebox controls to see if I could make that work.

Three times now I have done this and closed the code thinking that it was working.  When I've later gone back to reopen the code however, VB crashes when I merely try and open the form to view it (something about "could not read memory...).  I'm guessing that it doesn't like the fact that I'm using 6 different CommandBar controls on the same form.

Is it possible to do what I wanted to do to begin with, which is add one CommandBar control and programatically create 6 toolbars which will be resident on six different picturebox controls?  This would obviously be the right way to go, and avoid having to even deal with the crashes I'm having doing it the way I am now.  Seems like the CommandBar control would need an "Owner" property (which I don't seem to be able to find), or something like that, for each CommandBarControl object created to associate 6 different picturebox controls??

Thanks!

That's the problem.  I have created 6 different CommandBar objects for the form, and placed each of those CommandBar objects in separate PictureBox controls.  You're saying this should work?  Then why is the form crashing every time I try and start it?

Is there any thread out there, or other codejock documentation, that covers this in any detail?  I was going to try creating 6 additional borderless forms today, dropping the CommandBar control on each new form, and pointing the OLE_HANDLE of the tabs to these new forms to see if that would work.  That seems like a rather inefficient way to have to do it though...

Thanks for the responses! I gotta say the codejock forum has been great for response times.

That's what I've been doing.  Actually, I've set this up so that each codejock tab points to a PictureBox control as the OLE_HANDLE, then inserted a PictureBox control within THAT PictureBox control, then inserted a CommandBar control within THAT PictureBox control.  Make sense?

Also, I am assuming there is no way to use one CommandBar control and programatically create each CommandBarControl and "assign" them to a PictureBox control, correct?  

Hold on.  I just noticed that at least one of the controls hosting a CommandBar control is in fact a Frame control.  Sounds like this is a big no no, so I'm going to change this and see if that fixes the problem.  Will report results.

Thanks!

I think this is wrong, here it looks like you are trying to load an xcb file into all 4 commandbars in the CommandBars3 object (not sure what you are doing here).

DDJJ wrote: For i = 0 To 4      CommandBars3(i).LoadDesignerBars App.Path & "\MinorNavigation.xcb"      CommandBars3(i)(2).ContextMenuPresen t = False Next

To access a particular commandbar in a CommandBars object do this:

CommandBars(1).ContextMenuPresent = FALSE ' This is the ActiveMenuBar
CommandBars(2).ContextMenuPresent = FALSE ' This is the First CommandBar added
CommandBars(3).ContextMenuPresent = FALSE ' This is the Second CommandBar added
......

Why not just?:
    CommandBars3.LoadDesignerBars App.Path & "\MinorNavigation.xcb"
    CommandBars3(2).ContextMenuPresen t = False

This will remove the context menu entry for the 1st toolbar added in the MinorNavigation xcb file.

I think you meant this:

CommandBars3.LoadDesignerBars App.Path & "\MinorNavigation.xcb"
For i = 1 To 5
      CommandBars3(i).ContextMenuPresen t = False
Next


Edited by SuperMario