Is there a good way to create a form in VB6 that can easily be embedded inside other forms?
On a few occasions recently, I’ve wanted to design and code a Form object that I could plug into several other ‘parent’ forms. My goal is to create a centralized piece of code for managing several UI components in a particular way, and then be able to use that (both the UI layout and the logic) in more than one place. I’m certainly willing to use code (rather than the Design View) to load the child form.
The best I’ve come up with so far is to pull all of the interesting logic for the child form into a Class Module, and have each parent form lay out the UI (in a Picture control, perhaps) and pass that Picture object into the class module. The class then knows how to operate on the picture, and it assumes that all its expected pieces have been laid out appropriately. This approach has several downsides, and I’d like something a bit more elegant.
Take a look at VB6 UserControls; I think they are exactly what you need. You can create a UserControl within your project, add controls and code to that control, and then insert it onto a form just like standard VB6 controls. I’ve used UserControls to share UI layouts on many occasions and it works great.