Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

COMPLEX DATA BINDING

For some controls (such as the TextBox and Label) binding the Text property is good enough. Other controls, however, do not display a simple textual value.

For example, suppose that you have a database containing a Users table with fields FirstName, LastName, and UserType. The UserTypes table has fields UserTypeId and UserTypeName. The Users.UserType field contains a value that should match UserTypes.UserTypeId. The UserTypes.UserTypeName field contains values such as Programmer, Project Manager, Department Manager, Program Manager, and Lab Director.

When you build a form to display the Users table data, you would like to use a ComboBox to allow the user to select only the allowed choices Programmer, Project Manager, and so on. However, the Users table doesn’t store those string values. Instead it stores the UserTypeId value corresponding to the UserTypeName value that the user selects. When the user picks a UserTypes.UserTypeName value, the ComboBox should look up the corresponding UserTypes.UserTypeId value and save it in the Users.UserType field.

Clearly, the simple binding strategy used for TextBoxes won’t work here. Binding this control requires two rather complicated steps: defining the DataSet and binding the control. Each piece of the operation is easy, but you must do everything correctly. If you miss any detail, the ComboBox won’t work, and Visual Basic’s error messages probably won’t give you enough information to figure out how to fix the problem. ...