Difference between revisions of "A 'hello world' VBA program"

Revision as of 19:18, 10 March 2013

Creating a tab

• Enter the code below in a standard VBA module

• Run the sub to create an empty tab labeled 'My First Tab'

  

Code Analysis

Dim myCustomUI As rxCustomUI
Set myCustomUI = rxCustomUI.defaultInstance

rxCustomUI is at the top of the object model hierarchy. Here, we are holding on to the default rxCustomUI instance for the current session.

' Get a reference to the rxRibbon object of our rxCustomUI instance
Dim myRibbon As rxRibbon
Set myRibbon = myCustomUI.ribbon

Each rxCustomUI object owns a unique rxRibbon object. Here, we are holding on to the rxRibbon object of myCustomUI

' Create a new tab
Dim myTab As rxTab
Set myTab = New rxTab
 
' Give the new tab a label
myTab.Label = "My First Tab"

Here we create a new rxTab object and give it a label

' Add the new tab to myRibbon's tabs
myRibbon.tabs.Add myTab

Each rxRibbon object has a collection of rxTab objects (accessible through its .tabs property). Here we add the tab we created above to our ribbon's tabs

' Render the UI
myCustomUI.Refresh

To ensure optimal performance, UI updates always take place in two steps:

1. Update the target rxCustomUI state, which we have done above
2. Render the updated UI, which we are doing here

Notes

This sub will create a new empty tab every time it is run. We can prevent that from happening by adding a call to rxCustomUI.clear before we start updating its state, which resets the object's state (see #Making our code more compact) To explicitly reset the state of the default rxCustomUI, you can execute the lines below in the immediate window:

rxCustomUI.defaultInstance.clear
rxCustomUI.defaultInstance.refresh

Making our code more compact

The Dynamic RibbonX library has been specifically designed to take advantage of the 'With blocks' feature of VBA. All .add() methods returned the added object, so the code of this example can be rewritten like so: