Tab controls add a new level of
power to your abcDB applications. (Click here for more
info )
But it would be good to review how exactly you use tab
controls.
Note: The following
screenshots are taken from the States
application
If you still have the abcDB 'Form Designer' open, click the NEW
FORM toolbar icon (
). If you've already returned to the
main abcDB menu, go to the forms tab and click NEW.
This time, when prompted, base your new form on the tblStates
table, and when prompted, name the form 'frmTab' and click OK.
At this point your screen should look similiar to
this:
Now, since we want to show data from all the fields in out tblStates table,
let's save ourselves some work and let Desktop Studio create the basic form
automatically. Click the 'Form Wizard' toolbar icon () and you'll see the
following dialog box:
Since we want to automatically create controls based on our MAIN datasource,
let's enter 0 and click OK. Now we'll see something like the
following:
Now, our goal here is to 'modify' this form such that we will have a TAB
control with 3 tabs. The first tab will contain the state name and
abbreviation. The 2nd tab will contain the 'timezone' and the 3rd tab will
contain the 'capitol'.
So let's start by adding a TAB control to our form. When you're
done, your screen should look similar to this:
First of all, let's add the 3 tabs to our tab-control. We do this by
first selecting the TAB control (as we've already done in the above screen
shot), and clicking the TABPAGES property:
You will then be presented with the following screen.
Now as you can see, there are already 2 tabpages on this tab
control. We need 3, so let's click the ADD button once:
Now we need to change the TEXT of each of these tabpages. Let's call
our 1st page STATE.
This is easily accomplished by simply clicking on the first tabpage in the
list, and then in the right-hand pane, change the TEXT property to STATE.
Repeat this for the other two tabpages, calling them TIMEZONE and CAPITOL.
When you're done, click the OK button, and you should see a screen similar
to this:
Now that we've got our TAB control all set up, let's put the appropriate
controls onto each page. This is easily accomplished by first selecting
the 'page' and then dragging the controls onto the page.
For example, we want to move the 'state' label and textbox to our STATE
tabpage. So let's drag a 'selection box' around those two controls.
The easiest way to do this is to draw a box from the bottom right and up to the
top left. WHen you're done, you'll end up with something that looks like
this:
Now that we've got those two controls 'selected', we just need to 'drag'
them onto the tab control. When we're done, you'll see something like
this:
Now let's copy the FullStateName label and textbox to the tab:
Now let's click on the TIMEZONE tab and copy the appropriate controls to
it:
And finally, let's click on the CAPITOL tab and move those last
controls to it:
Finally, let's move the whole tab control back to the top-left corner of the
form so that we'll be able to see it when we run it on a PocketPC or in the
Emulator. To do this, all we need to do is 'select' the tab control by
clicking on it, and then move it by dragging on the large 
icon in the middle
of the selected tab control:
Now let's save our form and run it in the emulator:
Now you know the basics when it comes to using the abcDB 'TAB'
control. This is just one simple example of literally thousands! But
we'll leave the other 999 up to you!