Opening Forms At Run-Time

I have a number of forms in my project that are opened by selecting a menuitem, but I want to give the user the flexibility to decide what menuitem opens what form. In earlier versions of VB, I could refer to the forms collection to achieve this. But in VB.Net it seems that the name of the form must be known at design time e.g dim f as new frmMain. Does anyone know how I can supply frmMain at run-time.

Thanks

erimus

To allow users to decide what menuitems open what form you can dynamically add the click handlers for each menuitem at runtime.
i.e. have a procedure for the opening of each form depending on a parameter and then add a handler for the menuitem:-

addhandler menuitem1.click, addressof Openform(1)
addhandler menuitem2.click, addressof Openform(2)

public sub Openform(number as short)
if number = 1 then
dim f as new form1
f.show
else
dim f as new form2
end if
end sub

Is this closer to what you're looking for?

VB Code:

Public Function LoadForm(ByVal myFormName As String) As Form
    Dim myType As Type
    Dim myForm As Form
 
 
    myType = System.Type.GetType(myFormName, True, True)
 
    myForm = Activator.CreateInstance(myType)
 
    Return myForm
End Function

Of course, you'll probably want some exception handling in there.

Not sure, but you may need to change:

VB Code:

myType = System.Type.GetType(myFormName, True, True)

to:

VB Code:

myType = System.Type.GetType("ProjectName." & myFormName, True, True)

(Obviously, replacing "ProjectName" with your project :))