Question

How do I go about looping through all the controls within a container, and all the controls in the container of a containing control, and so on.

Form
-Panel
--Control
--Tab
----Control
----Control
--Tab
----Control

The following only retrieves -Panel and none of the other controls

For Each cntrl As Control In Me.Controls

Next

How can I retrieve them all in a For Each loop without an If/Then for every level in the stack?

EDIT:

Dim ctl As Control = Me
Do
    ctl = Me.GetNextControl(ctl, True)
    'Do whatever you have to ctl
Loop Until ctl Is Nothing

This is so far the best method I found of doing this.

Answer 1

You have to define a method that recursively traverse containers inside the container. Something like this:

 Dim _list As New List(Of Control)
 Public Sub GetChilds(container As Control)
        For Each child As Control In container.Controls
            _list.Add(child)
            If (child.HasChildren) Then
                GetChilds(child)
            End If
        Next
 End Sub

To call this method:

 list=new List(Of Control)
  GetChilds(Me)
  For Each cntrl As Control In _list
    ....
  Next