The following sections discuss
how referring to a form's members in code
can load a form into memory, and how the form's
Show and Hide methods relate to the loading
and unloading of a form.
Implicitly Loading a Form
A form which is not yet in memory
will load into memory automatically whenever
you refer to any of its built-in methods or
properties in code, or to any of the methods
or properties of a control on the form.
Thus, statements such as
Form1.Caption =
"Hello"
Form1.txtCity.Text = "Chicago"
Form1.Show
would cause Form1 to load if it had not already been loaded.
Causing a form to load in this way is known as implicit loading.
Show and Hide
These methods toggle a form's
visibility. Calling a form's Show method
sets the form's Visible property to True,
and the form then becomes the application's
active form. After a call to a form's
Hide method, the form's Visible property
will be False, and the form will no longer be
the application's active form.
The Show method does more than simply toggle a form's Visible
property: It also can accept a parameter that indicates the form's modal state.
-
A modeless form is the default way of managing
a form in an application. When a form displays
modelessly, the rest of the VB application
continues any execution it needs to finish,
and the user is able to freely navigate
between this modeless form and any other
forms in the application. Since modeless
is the default state, modeless is implied
when there is no reference to the parameter.
Form1.Show
MsgBox "Form1 visible" 'this line runs
immediately
If you wish to provide more clarity in your
code, you can use the vbModeless parameter:
Form1.Show vbModeless
-
A modal form demands more attention from
the user. If the form is displayed modally,
the user cannot navigate to other forms
in the application. The form remains active
until the form is closed. In addition, the
calling procedure that originally shows
the modal form with the call to its Show
method will not resume until the form has
been unloaded or hidden by either user action
or code. You can display a form modally
by calling the Show method with the vbModal
constant as a parameter:
Form1.Show vbModal
'Next line won't run
'till after Form1 is dismissed
MsgBox "Finished Form1"
See "Show/Hide Methods Versus Load/Unload
Statements."
