Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Sat Apr 19 10:08:14 CDT 2008
Hi John One method would be to have a MDI parent form from which you open the other forms as child forms. Then you just to either keep track of what you open or to loop through the child forms collection to see if it contains a certain child form. In VS2008 the Add New wizard will happily create a new MDI parent form with basic functionality. /gustav >>> jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com 19-04-2008 16:05 >>> I purchased a .Net library that does name splitting. http://www.softwarecompany.com/dotnet/netgender.htm It seems to work well just from using the little demo that you can download. Now I am starting to actually work with it. It consists of a single class, embedded in a dll that you reference, with properties to set to tell it all of the controlling stuff, then properties to hand it the name to split and read back the name pieces. The developer claims that it will handle between 2K and 3K names per second. We shall see. So here I am trying to work with this thing. The demo form is quite extensive and the code in the form shows how to read / write all of the properties to populate the form. I have a database with (of course) about 80 million names, in a single field, in the form LastName FirstName MiddleInitial (no commas etc) which needs parsing. What I thought I would do (just for the moment) is to use the existing form and just feed in the names. Thus I need to add a couple of properties to the form such that I can feed in names and get back the parsed pieces. I will build a switch to tell the form to display the pieces or not, thus I could watch the process function if I wanted, though at the cost of slowing the process down. Modifications to the demo form to allow me to do all that stuff is just about complete. What I need to know is the syntax to get a pointer to a form being opened. I know that you just do a "Someform.Show" to open the form, but a parent form needs to get a pointer to this demo form and then use that pointer to set / retrieve properties. How do I get a pointer to it once opened? -- John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com