[AccessD] Rich text text boxes

[John Colby]

Ryan,

I just got this working an hour ago, and what I have working is bog
standard simple so far.

The text control is obviously NOT a browser.  How it works is a mystery,
however it does allow at least a modicum of HTML formatting.  I am already
running into 'use css' for stuff I want to do, and (not sure but) I don't
think the control understands css.

I am considering whether to add a clsHTMLLine to handle all of the HTML
'stuff' for a given line of text.    Thus a line could be treated as its
own entity and stored in a collection in my txt control class, rather
simply appending it to one big html string and moving on.  One big HTML
string is obviously simpler and what I am doing for now.



On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 10:47 AM Ryan W <wrwehler at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've recently been mucking with Rich Text too, though I am just allowing
> users to use the text formatting options in the ribbon in the rich text
> field.
>
> I did find that the only thing setting the Text Format property on a
> table/column does is make Access smarter when you drag and drop that
> field/column onto a form (or when you use a form/report creation wizard),
> it auto sets the control bound to the column to Rich Text .
>
> Binding the form/report control to a non rich text column (say in a linked
> table) only requires you to set the control to allow Rich Text to get those
> "benefits" thankfully. I didn't want to mess with my ODBC Linking code to
> also handle column properties.
>
> And just like you, I did find that programmatically trying to add wording
> to rich text fields stinks. I simply chose when I needed to add to that
> column via VBA was to simply wrap whatever I was adding in div tags.   I'll
> let my end users chose what to do with the phrasing added on their own
> accord.
>
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 9:31 AM John Colby <jwcolby at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm sure some of our more experienced members will slap me around, but I
> > just had to share my solution.
> >
> > Problem: the rich text text box in access "only works" bound to a rich
> text
> > field.  Furthermore, the data in the field is HTML (ish) and all of that
> > formatting stuff apparently is not available to get back from said field.
> > Which makes writing rich text programmatically a roya PITA.  I have spent
> > the morning googling and found pretty much nothing, at least in the
> Access
> > vba side of the house.
> >
> > Solution:  Wrote my own.
> >
> > The answer lies in generating HTML dynamically.
> >
> > However before you can do ANYTHING you have to get a text box with it's
> > format set to 'Rich Text' which is non-trivial.  In fact the only way I
> > have found to do so is to create a table with rich text fields, then
> bind a
> > form to that, then bind a text box to one of those fields, then set the
> > format of the text box to 'Rich text' which is suddenly available simply
> > because it is bound to a rich text field.  Once I had that , I unbound
> (is
> > that a word) the text box, but it kept the 'Rich Text' format.  Voila a
> > text box that can understand and process HTML tags.
> >
> > From there, I created a class (of course).  The objective of the class is
> > to wrap a 'Rich text' text box and allow vba to do the mucking around
> with
> > html format codes.
> >
> > I pass in the text box to the init and store the text box in the header
> of
> > the class so I can access it inside of the class.
> >
> > I then wrote a function to pass in a message I wanted to display in the
> > text box and a boolean to bold it or not, defaulted to not.
> >
> > Function fWriteTextBox(lstrMsg As String, _
> >                             Optional blnBold As Boolean = False)
> >
> > Dim lstr As String
> >     lstr = lstrMsg
> >     If blnBold Then
> >         lstr = "<b>" & lstr & "</b>"
> >     Else
> >     End If
> >     If mLineCnt > 0 Then
> >         lstr = "<br>" & lstr
> >     End If
> >     mstrHTMLMsg = mstrHTMLMsg & lstr
> >     mtxtStatus.SetFocus
> >   mtxtStatus.Text = mstrHTMLMsg
> >     mLineCnt = mLineCnt + 1
> >
> > Exit_fWriteTextBox:
> >     On Error GoTo 0
> >     Exit Function
> > end function
> >
> > In the form header
> >
> > Dim mclsLicenseStatusText As clsStatusText
> >
> > In the Form_Open
> >
> >     Set mclsLicenseStatusText = New clsStatusText  'Instantiate the beast
> >     mclsLicenseStatusText.Init Me, txtLicenseStatus  'Pass in the text
> box
> >
> >     mclsLicenseStatusText.fWriteTextBox "This is a test" 'Write a string
> > without bold
> >     mclsLicenseStatusText.fWriteTextBox "This is a BOLD test", True '
> Again
> > with bold
> >
> > GUESS WHAT!  IT WORKS!!!
> >
> > The text box in my form displays the two lines of text stuff, one bolded,
> > the other not.
> >
> > Can you say ROYAL PITA?  But IT WORKS.
> >
> > So now I need to flesh out the class to allow other format tags.  I
> desire
> > to allow colors, bold, italics, font etc.  Slowly over time I think I can
> > do this thing.  We shall see if and what the limitations of the text box
> > are.  But I am simply jazzed that I can do anything at all of this
> nature.
> >
> > Furthermore the built up HTML string is available for me to look at /
> read
> > back as opposed to the 'bound to a table' method.
> >
> > OK, now the real heavyweights of the list can commence the
> slapping.🤕😜😁
> > --
> > John W. Colby
> > Colby Consulting
> > --
> > AccessD mailing list
> > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com
> > https://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd
> > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
> >
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>


-- 
John W. Colby
Colby Consulting