Question

I have been wondering for a while about the code below:

ListView1.View = View.Details   
ListView1.Columns.Add("c1")   
ListView1.Columns.Add("c2")  
Dim Item As New ListViewItem    
Item.Text = "1"
Item.SubItems.Add("2")
ListView1.Items.Add(Item)

---

'MsgBox(ListView1.Items(0).SubItems("c1").Text) 'this is wrong  
MsgBox(ListView1.Items(0).SubItems(0).Text) 'this is right  

I want a way to refer to the column by its name, because it is more readable, and lessens the chance of making a mistake. However, the program won’t build. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You can specify name for ListViewSubItem and refer to subitem by that name:

Dim subItem As New ListViewItem.ListViewSubItem
subItem.Name = "c1"
subItem.Text = "SubItem"
Item.SubItems.Add(subItem)

If you add your subitems in this way, MsgBox(ListView1.Items(0).SubItems("c1").Text) will work.

Update:

Unfortunately, this won’t work for the first subitem. To fix this, you might need to create all subitems (including default) before ListViewItem:

Dim subItems As ListViewItem.ListViewSubItem() = New ListViewItem.ListViewSubItem(2 - 1) {}
subItems(0) = New ListViewItem.ListViewSubItem()
subItems(0).Name = ListView1.Columns(0).Text
subItems(0).Text = "Default SubItem"
subItems(1) = New ListViewItem.ListViewSubItem()
subItems(1).Name = ListView1.Columns(1).Text
subItems(1).Text = "SubItem 1"
Dim Item As New ListViewItem(subItems, 0)
ListView1.Items.Add(Item)