Visual Basic 6 Black Book
(Publisher: The Coriolis Group)
Author(s): Steven Holzner
ISBN: 1576102831
Publication Date: 08/01/98

Chapter 14
The Frame, Label, Shape, And Line Controls

If you need an immediate solution to:

Adding A Frame To A Program

Setting Frame Size And Location

Dragging And Dropping Controls

Grouping Controls In A Frame

Adding A Label To A Program

Using Labels Instead Of Text Boxes

Formatting Text In Labels

Aligning Text In Labels

Handling Label Control Events

Using Labels To Give Access Keys To Controls Without Captions

Adding A Shape Control To A Program

Drawing Rectangles

Drawing Squares

Drawing Ovals

Drawing Circles

Drawing Rounded Rectangles

Drawing Rounded Squares

Setting Shape Borders: Drawing Width, Dashes, And Dots

Filling Shapes

Drawing A Shape Without The IDE Grid

Moving Shapes At Runtime

Adding A Line Control To A Program

Drawing Thicker, Dotted, And Dashed Lines

Drawing A Line Without The IDE Grid

Changing A Line Control At Runtime

Using Form Methods To Draw Lines

Using Form Methods To Draw Circles

In Depth

In this chapter, we’re going to examine the controls you use to organize and label other controls in a form: the frame, label, shape, and line controls. You use the frame control to create a frame—a labeled box—in which you can place the following types of controls:

•  Label controls to display noneditable text usually used to describe other controls or control groups

•  Shape controls to draw circles and boxes in a form

•  Line controls to draw lines

These controls are used primarily at design time, but they have their runtime uses as well, as we’ll see. All these controls are intrinsic controls—that is, they appear in the toolbox when Visual Basic starts—and we’ll take a closer look at all these controls now.

The Frame Control

You usually use the frame control to group controls together into a recognizable group. This control appears as a box with a label at upper left. You can make the controls in a frame into a functional group as well, such as when you group option buttons together. When you add option buttons to a frame, those buttons function in concert; when you click one, all the others are deselected. And those option buttons are separate from any other group of option buttons in the form.

The Frame Control tool appears as the third tool down on the left in the Visual Basic toolbox in Figure 14.1.

Figure 14.1  The Frame Control tool.

The Label Control

You use label controls to display text that you don’t want the user to change directly. As their name implies, you can use these controls to display text that labels other parts of the form that don’t have their own captions. For example, you might label a picture box something like “Current image”, or a text box “New setting”.

Despite their name, label controls are not static. You can change the text in a label at runtime by setting its Caption property, and in fact that’s often a very useful thing to do if you don’t want the user to change that text. For example, we’ll see how to build a stopwatch example in this chapter that displays the time in a label control. The label control in that example may be far from what you think of as a standard label, because the text in the label will change, and that text will be large—48 point. It’s wise to remember that labels can indeed display any kind of text—you can even format, word wrap, or size a label to fit its text. All in all, labels are one of the most useful Visual Basic controls. They can even have Click events and access keys, as we’ll see in this chapter.

The Label Control tool appears in the toolbox in Figure 14.2 as the second tool down on the left. Just about every Visual Basic programmer is familiar with this control, but we’ll see some new label tricks in this chapter.

Figure 14.2  The Label Control tool.

The Shape Control

The shape control is a graphical control. You can use this control to draw predefined colored and filled shapes, including rectangles, squares, ovals, circles, rounded rectangles, or rounded squares.

You use the shape control at design time to draw shapes in a form. There’s no great programming complexity here—you just use this control as a design element to add rectangles, circles, and so on to your forms. In this way, the shape control is a little like the frame control; however, shapes can’t act as control containers (for example, you can’t group option buttons together with shapes or move the controls inside them en masse). Still, shapes certainly come in more varieties than frames do.

Although shape controls are one of the Visual Basic intrinsic controls, Visual Basic programmers remain largely ignorant of them. That’s too bad, because you can create some nice effects with shapes, as we’ll see here.

The Shape Control tool appears in the Visual Basic toolbox in Figure 14.3 as the ninth tool down on the left.

Figure 14.3  The Shape Control and Line Control tools.

The Line Control

Like the shape control, the line control is a graphical control. You use it to display horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines in a form. You can use these controls at design time as a design element or at runtime to alter the original line you drew.

Drawing lines is easy—you just click the Line Control tool in the toolbox, press the mouse button when the cursor is at the line’s start location on the form, and drag the mouse to the end position of the line. When you release the mouse, the line appears with sizing handles at each end that you can use to change the line as you like. You can also change a line at runtime by changing its X1, X2, Y1, and Y2 properties.

You can draw lines with this control in forms, picture boxes, and frames. In fact, lines drawn with the line control stay visible even if its container’s AutoRedraw property is set to False. (The line control even has its own Visible property, which means you can make lines appear and disappear.) The Line Control tool appears in the toolbox in Figure 14.3 as the ninth tool down on the right.