Programming Visual Basic 2005

Creating the Customer Detail Page

Once the program is fully functional, the Find button will examine the contents of the text boxes and seek to find all the customers that match the text provided. If a single match is found, a form will open with details about that customer.

For now, we'll bypass the issue of what happens when multiple matches are found, and we'll even bypass the database search, and just build the form that will be filled in with the customer's details.

To get started, you need to create a second form, frmCustomerDetails. Right-click on the solution and choose Add Class. From within the dialog, choose Windows Form as the type of item you wish to add, and name the form frmCustomerDetails.vb, as shown in Figure 1-16. Click Add to add the new form.

Resize your form to 600,300. Click on your form and change the caption (using the Text property) to Customer Details.

Our task for this form is to add a menu, tab controls, and the controls necessary to display and edit the Customer information. The specifications call for this form to open in Read Only mode; the user must explicitly choose the menu item Edit to make the fields editable, and then Save to save the changes made in Edit mode (which returns the user to Read Mode).

Figure 1-16. Add second form

Adding a Menu

You'll begin by adding a menu to the form. To do so, first drag a menu strip onto the form. Two things will happen: ...