Follow up to Transparency Forms

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Opa-Horst — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:10:07 GMT

Very need indeed, but doesn’t seem to work properly on my system (XP).

The login form seems to sit behind the lightbox form and seems not to be active. I can type information in the login box, but the buttons don’t work. Can you help?

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Renaud Bompuis — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:20:24 GMT

Hi Rob,

I'll have a hard time one-upping this now :-)

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Edwin Blancovitch — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:47:32 GMT

HEy guys this is great, i was wondering how to acomplish this, but you have come with a solution.

I was wondering, can ypu make this in an downloadable example.

It will be great to have such coded already implemented.

You guys talk about renaud's class and Rob Cooper Love for class modules . . .

Can you just create and publish it here, so we can all bennefit.

What do you say?

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

María — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:24:08 GMT

Hi Rob, Thanks for sharing with us your great work !!, i´ve just implemented in a new project that I am working on..

By the way I post a code problem in the Wrox Forum, Do you have the opprotunity to read it ??

Thanks again .

Maria

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

robcooper — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:39:58 GMT

Opa-Horst: Make sure that the frmLogin form has the Popup and Modal properties set to Yes.

Renaud: :) Thanks for your comments in the previous post!

Edwin: Good suggestion! I'll see if this is something we can do.

Maria: Thanks - glad to hear you'll be able to take advantage of this! I read the question in the Wrox forum and will try to respond through there.

Rob

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

David — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:55:30 GMT

Yes, an example mdb would be helpful because I get an error in the line:

Private m_objLightbox As LightboxForm

no matter what version of Access I use.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Opa-Horst — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:37:21 GMT

Thanks Rob, login form wasn’t set to pop-up, changed it and it works beautifully now! Will apply it to my current project. Really great!

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

robcooper — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:41:27 GMT

Opa-Horst: Thanks for the feedback!

David: What is the error you are seeing?

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Renaud Bompuis — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:48:39 GMT

For anyone interested, I have included Rob's code and made some minor improvements to my sample databases.

You an get them from my blog, just click on my name above.

Thanks again Rob for sharing this with us, it was enlightening :-)

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Vladimir Cvajniga — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:16:39 GMT

Can this trick be implemented in the next version of Access so that no coding is needed?

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Vladimir Cvajniga — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:57:21 GMT

Access 2007: Is there any function to highlight current row in continuous form? I'm talking about form with conditionally formatted fields, ie. not just a datasheet.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Renaud Bompuis — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:55:50 GMT

To Vladimir: you should have a look at some of the forums and websites like AccessMonster and the sites from the Access MVP (just search for it, there are a few interesting web sites).

I'm not giving links here because it seems the comments don't get through.

There is not -to my knowledge- any function to highlight the current row in a continuous form. There are a few tricks that can work using a textbox behind the other controls and conditional formatting to change its backcolor for the current record.

Have a look at Stephen Lebans' website.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Renaud Bompuis — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:30:17 GMT

To Vladimir again: after experimenting a bit I got row highlighting working in a way that's simple and probably nicer than the usual stuff I've seen.

In your continuous form, add a Panel and call it Highlighter, make it fit the size of the area to highlight (the size of the Detail section in the form). Send the Panel behind the other controls.

Add the following to your Form's code (supposing that ID is the Unique ID field of your record):

Dim currentId As Variant

Private Sub Form_Current()

currentId = ID

End Sub

Add the following code to the Detail section's OnPaint event:

Private Sub Detail_Paint()

If (ID = currentId) Then

Highlighter.BackColor = vbYellow

Else

Highlighter.BackColor = vbWhite

End If

End Sub

If anyone is interested I will make a post on this with a sample database.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Edwin Blancovitch — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:31:23 GMT

Reneaud, and Vladimir.

Reneaud, you said, :"Add a panel", what do you meant by a panel, i think you meant a textbox, correct?

I have been trying with a lot of coding for the current row highlight, and i have seen the code of stephens , by the way great implementation.

I was using lebans solution until this new verssion of access, the problem was that new verssion uses a different image format, than old verssions of access.

I personally contacted stephen and he told me to use other solutions because his was outdated.

Well, i started looking and in utter access i found a great solution, working with just a textbox(one by each color) and changing the expression inside the text box, and using a block character to fill the textbox.

It just works, and is great, very light solution, the only problem is that it takes a lot of textboxes to acomplish what we need.

Vladimir, did you were able to make the ribbon work, or to just enable the old command bars in your solution, we just left that conversation somewhere in space.

Will like to know what happened?

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Vladimir Cvajniga — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:18:40 GMT

Edwin: Still trying to get it to work. There's a bug in A2007: when I open 2002 MDB I can see my CommandBar - that's what I need; but when I save the MDB as ACDDB the CommandBar disappears - I can see other CommandBars instead. :-(

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Vladimir Cvajniga — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:47:48 GMT

Renaud Bompuis: I use that trick in my A97 projects. But it can't be done with different colors for different fields and/or with fields with conditional formatting.

Current status:

http://img140.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=71850_CurrentRow-current_status_122_653lo.jpg

This is what I get when I use "the trick":

http://img109.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=71925_CurrentRow-what_I_get_122_1042lo.jpg

This is what I really need:

http://img239.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=72102_CurrentRow-what_I_need_122_79lo.jpg

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Renaud Bompuis — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:28:00 GMT

To Vladimir and Edwin: I'm sorry, I just realised that I used the wrong terminology. By Panel I meant Rectlangle (*not* a TextBox).

From your screenshots it seems that you want to add a shade to all the fields for the current row rather than just highlight it in a single colour.

It's probably possible to go through each control during the Detail_Paint() and calculate its backcolor to add a darker shade but I'm not sure how well it would work.

If I have a bit of time I'll try to make a blog post and a sample database this week-end on that subject.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Vladimir Cvajniga — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:41:16 GMT

Renaud Bompuis "From your screenshots it seems that you want to add a shade to all the fields for the current row rather than just highlight it in a single colour."

Yes, you've got the idea!

P.S. I think that "What's new in Access 2007" was talking about highligthing of current row, but now I realised that it was meant for datasheets only. :-(

I'm really disappointed...

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Vladimir Cvajniga — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:45:32 GMT

Renaud Bompuis: I'd appreciate if new record in continuous form was graphically distinguished as well. Maybe different grade of shade or something like that.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Phillip Kocmoud — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:34:44 GMT

This creates a great effect, but I'm stuck on the following problem:

The LightboxForm can still take the focus, when clicked on. Even though the login form is in the foreground and set as modal and popup.

If I Alt-f4 to close the LightboxForm, the login form comes to the foreground again and functions normailly as a modal form.

Is there a way to make the LightboxForm focus disabled?

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Renaud Bompuis — Sat, 10 May 2008 05:03:02 GMT

@Phillip: this should not happen. Make sure that the frmLightBox has its modal property set to "No".

Whenever you use the transaprency layer you have to make sure that it's in a scenario where it's opened from a popup modal dialog box like the login form in the example.

The transparency layer is just a normal form so if you open it from non-modal forms it will be clickable and may end-up at the top of other windows.

If this still happens to you I would suggest adding a property to the LightBoxForm such as OpeningForm where you keep a reference to the form that opened the layer (such as the Login form in the example).

Add some code to the OnFocus event for the frmLightBox to move back the focus to that OpeningForm.

It shouldn't be necessary though.

Another thing that usually cause problems is to open modal forms from other modal forms: there should never be more than one modal form open at any time.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Phillip Kocmoud — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:49:42 GMT

Thank you Renaud!

It turned out to be caused by calling it from an separate open modal form.

re: Follow up to Transparency Forms

Edwin Blancovitch — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:27:05 GMT

I think you are the appropriate guys so i can ask this question.

If you reads posts from Vladimir and others . . . you will see need n code from access to do things that are needed in a program such as access.

Access community really needs not only to highlight the current row, also need to create conditional formatting rows based on more than 3 conditions, and maybe also use icons.

If you guys do not fix a solution people just start to see other products like external grids and stuff not necessarily. . .

I used to have code from www.lebans.com to highlight the current row in datasheet or continuous form, also to highlight the row based on some conditions, (the access embed conditional format only supports 3)

lebans created a solution for this, but now is outdated, I think you guys can revise the api's and create a new solution(maybe give it to Microsoft :-) )

The thing is that if you look into excel you have a great conditional formatting options even with icons and all that stuff, but that doesn’t exist for excel.

What do you say, can you guys do it?