[AccessD] ...table driven command/menu bar interface needed

William Hindman wdhindman at dejpolsystems.com
Fri May 7 16:27:34 CDT 2010


...I'm dealing with a coming transition to Win7/64 and Office10/64 for a 
major client ...but I'm still supporting his app in A2k3.

...I use a LOT of treeviews/listviews based on the MSCOMCTL.ocx which is 
32bit and not supported in 64bit Office2010 and MS is not 
replacing/upgrading it.

...so I'm rethinking my entire GUI which is currently built on a 
treeview.ocx in a sidebar ...in fact I have a native Access treeview working 
now built around a continuous form/subform ...it works, looks good, and I 
could go with it.

...but I'm also implementing a graphical floorplan based forms interface 
(hotspots, zoom/pan, data driven) for this client that greatly benefits from 
as much screen space as possible and the treeview sidebar takes up at least 
a full two inches of every screens width.

...so I've been experimenting with using a menu bar dropdown gui instead, 
especially now that Access2010 lets me ditch the ribbon in favor of a 
lightweight command bar menu again ...and it works ...maximizes my screen 
space availability and is pretty user/security friendly.

...but besides a couple of 3rd party apps from aad and peter's software that 
have, imnsho, severe limitations, I've not yet found a way to drive the menu 
bar dynamically from a table like I do my treeview menus ...which means 
every thing has to be custom coded in vba ...a royal pita, time consuming, 
and a source of unending errors ...again imnsho.

...so having spent three days looking for a table driven solution on the 
web, the only thing I found was a vba coded solution for excel worksheets 
which uses an entirely different command bar object model than Access ...or 
an Add-in Express plug-in to build an add-in solution which I'm not enamored 
by ...not yet anyway.

...so here I am asking if anyone here has ever built a such an interface and 
would care to either share it or point me in the right direction ...or tell 
me once more that I'm nuts and it can't be done in Access ;)

...any takers?

William 





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