Question

I’m currently working on a small side project as a way of getting used to Forms in Visual Studio 2012, as I usually only work with Console Applications. My current layout is designed to use tabs, and the user is to specify how many of the tabs they need for this application. They then fill out some information and it will be formatted and output to a file at a location specified by the user. On to the questions.

In order to stop duplicate tabs from existing, I’m using the following:

private void comboTabs_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (comboSkills.SelectedIndex == 0)
    {
        tabControl1.TabPages.Remove(tab8);
        tabControl1.TabPages.Remove(tab7);
        tabControl1.TabPages.Remove(tab6);
        tabControl1.TabPages.Remove(tab5);
        tabControl1.TabPages.Remove(tab4);
    }
    //repeat for Index 1, 2 and so on
}

There will always be a minimum of 3 tabs, so the first selection on the combo box removes tabs 4 through 8. The next selection does the same, but then adds tab4 back again. This goes on for the following selections. Is there any way I can do this more conveniently?

Second question, each tab has a series of text boxes and combo boxes that users are to select information from. The problem I’m having is that I need to identify how many tabs the user has selected and then only pull information from those tabs. I’m aware that I can get the number of tabs with:

int numberoftabs = tabControl1.TabCount;

But after that I can’t seem to read the information from them. I’m intending to do

for (int i = 0; i < numberoftabs; i++)
{
    //get textbox text of tab i and so on            
}

Is there any way I can do this? I was hoping to use a tab layout since I like my current layout very much. If it makes a difference, all the tabs have the same layout, and share a naming convention such as tab 1 text box 1 is textTab1Name, tab 2 text box 2 is textTab2Name and so on.

Answer 1

For the first part of your question, you can handle all cases with this piece of code:

var tabCount = 5 - comboBox1.SelectedIndex;

for (var i = 0; i < tabCount; i++)
{
    tabControl1.TabPages.RemoveAt(7-i);
}

For the second part you will have to create this method:

private T GetControl<T>(string name) where T : Control
{
   return (T) this.Controls.Find(name, true).FirstOrDefault();
}

Then you can write your text retrieval loop like this:

for (int i = 0; i < numberoftabs; i++)  
{
    //get textbox text of tab i and so on            
    TextBox textBox1 = GetControl<TextBox>("textTab" + i + "Name");
    ...
    etc..
}