Sensible form management

[sparklesdan]

I'm trying to find a sensible form management method to allow referencing methods across forms. In brief here's my problem:

Traditionally I've always done this by declaring the form containing the element I want to reference as a local variable at the point of reference. So kind of like this:

Dim form as frmReference = frmReference.ActiveForm

. Which is great, except this will only work when referencing between two forms where one of the forms called the other. Not exactly useful for any project with >2 forms, and even when it does work it quickly becomes horribly messy.

This started becoming unusable within my current project today, so I tried a different tact. Created a class to hold references to all my forms, whereby each form has a decleration within the class to which they assign themselves when they launch

clFormLib.frmReference = Me in frmReference_load

Great, a lot neater solution and if a form's open then I can now access it and its properties from anywhere. Except I can't. Because now the compiler refuses to acknowledge that the elements I am trying to reference on these forms exist, because of course the variables which hold the form references aren't assigned to anything before the application is running. So now I can't compile anything!

Can anyone suggest a better form management method to allow me to reference elements through multiple forms within in the application?

Thanks.

[salvelinus]

In a module:

Public frm1 as New frmSomeName
Public frm2 as New frmSomeOtherName
Public frm3 as new frmMoreName

Sub Main
Application.run(frm1)
End Sub

In frmSomeOtherName 'for example

Private Sub DoSomething()
strSomething = frm1.txtID.text
strElse = frm3.txtName.text
End Sub

[sparklesdan]

You mean to use the module containing the form references as the initially loaded object then I presume?

Surely by declaring them as new forms at the outset this will mean that they are all loaded into memory? Which could equal quite a bit of performace degradation?

I shall have a play with this idea though, thankyou.

[salvelinus]

You could declare it in another form, say

In frmSomeOtherName

dim frm3 as new frmMoreName
frm3.txtName = strName

You can do this, but if you declare a new frmMoreName in another form, you'll now have two instances of frmMoreName, probably not what you want.