Phase 1

After building form we need to make sure we can bring data from our “Notepad” text file into our application. To do that we need to build a menu with all of the options we want. And we need to add the common dialog objects to our form. To do that we go to our tool box and add the “MainMenu” tool, the “OpenFileDialog” tool and the “SaveFileDialog” too. We’ll use the “SaveFileDialog” later.

Naturally I change the name of these files to follow Hungarian Notation standards. Then added the dropdown menu for “File” as you can see above. All that’s left is to write the code for the “File | Open” routine. It looks like this:

Basically lines 329 thru 333 set up the File Open dialog. It doesn’t open until line 335 executes. When the user pressed the “OK” key the “IF” statement is executed.

Line 336 reads the file name and path into our global variable strCurrentFile. Now any routine we write can use that file without using the dialogs.

Lines 339 thru 346 counts the number of records in the file. Notice that we read in three variables (strDummy1 thru strDummy3) to account for a single record. And since the count is off by one we decrement the count by one

Once we know the number of records in the file we can set up our array. We do that inline 349. We redimension the array to reflect 3 fields and intMax records. intMax is the count.

Lines 351 thru 355 reads the entire file into memory. After this routine complete all records are now in memory and we can work at them at the speed of light.

Finally I set our array pointer “intPos” to 1 so it is pointing at the first record and then I call the routine “Fill_Screen()” which actually fills the text boxes on our form. The code looks like this:

As you can see it simple moves the data from the three cells in our array to our text boxes. That’s phase I. We’ve got data on the screen. Next…, more fun.