Second Tab in a MenuItem displayed as a square.

[Mike Hildner]

I'm dynamically creating menu items from a few database columns. I want to format the line of text so it looks clean, so I tried separating with tabs. Problem is, only the first tab gets displayed as a tab, the second and third will get displayed as a square.

Any ideas? Code snippet:

cmd.CommandText = "SELECT Agency, Call, Violation FROM vActiveCalls"
                dr = cmd.ExecuteReader
                While dr.Read
                    mi.MenuItems.Add(dr.GetString(0) & Chr(9) & dr.GetString(1) & Chr(9) & dr.GetString(2))
                End While

[Edneeis]

Try using ControlChars.Tab or " " instead of Chr(9) and see if that works.

[Mike Hildner]

ControlChars.Tab, Chr(9) and vbTab all produce the same (bad) result.

A space (" ") does work ok, but I was hoping for column-type formatting when the column text is of varying length.

[Edneeis]

Actually I tried to put 5 spaces but HTML ruined it I guess. To create a column effect you can could try using the Pad methods. If you use a fixed width font like New Courier then it works well other wise it just gets you sort of there. Here is an example:

Dim col1() As String = {"Ed", "Mike", "Cookie"}
        Dim col2() As String = {"Developer", "Hardware Tech", "Vice President"}
        Dim col3() As String = {"$43,000", "$35,000", "$85,000"}
        Dim collength As Integer = 18
        For x As Integer = 0 To 2
            mnuTest.MenuItems.Add(col1(x).PadRight(collength) & col2(x).PadRight(collength) & col3(x).PadRight(collength))
        Next

Actually after testing it might not be what you want.

[Mike Hildner]

I'll give that a try, thanks. This is a reponse I got from a microsoft news group:

> In menu items the tab character has a special semantic. It's used to
> separate the accelerator from the caption. You cannot use more than one
> tab. Alternatively you may want to create your own "ownerdrawn" menu:
>
> <http://www.codeproject.net/vb/net/vsnetstylemenusvb.asp>
> <http://www.codeproject.net/vb/net/iconsmenu.asp>
>