How much is that doggy in the window

[Noel Scully]

Does using multiple forms istead of setting controls visible or invisible at runtime use a lot more resources - it would seem that using a form is a neater way to group controls than having controls placed on top of one another

if you know your controls, how many you have, their names, then you don't care if they r on top of each other or no; VB takes care of it 4 u

[MartinLiss]

Unless your screens look very much like each other I vote for multiple forms. If you unload forms that are not being used, then I don't think you need to worry about increased resource use. Multiple forms will also be much easier to maintain (and understand), which at least in a commercial app is a very important consideration.

P.S. I've done both.

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Marty
Can you buy an entire chess set in a pawn shop?


[This message has been edited by MartinLiss (edited 01-21-2000).]

[andymac]

We had similar - imagine a database maintenance program. You've got multiple tables to maintain which you may or may not want users to see, fields which you want to display with lists, rather than being allowed to type in anything. The long and short of it was the previous system had a form for each table (and also a form for adding and a form for updating). This meant that in our system with 30 tables... 90 forms !. Now that's a very BAD situation for maintenance, because if you have to make a CODE change (rather than a change to add a record) you have to change at least 30 forms. It can also difficult to maintain the look and feel. However our main problem was that each time you change your program, you have to recompile and send out a new EXE. What we did (and it may not work in your instance), was to store the form layouts and "constructors" in the database that we were modifying. That way if we wanted to add another field of a list to a particular form, we only had to change the database. No recompile, no problems. The user just sees a new field the next time they load the program.

Hope this give another side

cheers

Andy