Dynamic ListViewItem image at runtime

It's easy enough to set the ListViewItem's icon when you already have an ImageList defined. What should you do when you need to read the icon file name from a DB at runtime?

DB stuff is no problem. But it seems I would have to populate an ImageList at runtime to load up the icon from disk. The app needs to refresh often, and also notice new entries. My problem is that there seems to be no way to refer to an entry in the ImageList besides it's index. How can I tell if I should load up an image, or just re-use one that's already there?

Thanks,
Mike

Whats the problem with populating an imagelist at runtime?

VB Code:

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
 
        ImageList1.Images.Add(Image.FromFile("C:\icontest\1.ico"))
        ImageList1.Images.Add(Image.FromFile("C:\icontest\2.ico"))
        ImageList1.Images.Add(Image.FromFile("C:\icontest\3.ico"))
 
        ListView1.LargeImageList = ImageList1
 
        ListView1.Items.Add(New ListViewItem("One", 0))
        ListView1.Items.Add(New ListViewItem("Two", 1))
        ListView1.Items.Add(New ListViewItem("Three", 2))
 
    End Sub

You could keep a string array that holds all the icon filenames currently loaded, when checking for updates, do a binary search for the path in the array...

VB Code:

Array.BinarySearch(MyArray, "c:\...\MyIcon.ico")

If the path is found just use the one in the imagelist. Otherwise load it into the imagelist before using it.

Or is that not the problem?

No, that's exactly what I was wondering, that is, the best way to go about it. Guess I was looking for a .Tag property for each image, but I guess a string array would serve the same purpose.

Thanks for the input.