Progress Bar VB

Progress Bar VB
Progress bars are a very handy control within the Visual Basic environment.

They can give you a visual indicator of how 'far' through a recordset or dataset your application has reached. When searching through a large number of records it is a good way to let the user know that things are 'still happening' and that the system has not hung.

Here we will give a simple example in VB6

Open VB and create a new standard project

In the Project menu option, choose 'Components' and scroll down the list. You should come to Microsoft Windows Common Controls 6.0 (Depending on which service pack you have installed)

Check it and a tick will appear

Click OK and more controls will have appeared in the toolbox

Now you can drag a progress bar control onto the form. Place it and a command button on the form. We always rename our controls to something meaningul (EG: cmdSave) but for the purposes of this example we won't bother renaming any controls.

Now we will play with a few properties:

Set the Min property to 1
Set the Max property to 10
Set the Scrolling property to ccScrollingSmooth

Now in the Command1 Code enter the following:

Dim iIndex As Integer

'Clear the progress bar - it cannot be less than the min property
ProgressBar1.Value = 1

For iIndex = 1 To 9

'Increment the progress bar
ProgressBar1.Value = ProgressBar1.Value + 1
Call Wait(0.1)
Next

Now paste in the follwing private subroutine:

Private Sub Wait(ByVal iHowManySecs As Integer)
Dim dStart As Date

On Error GoTo WaitErr

dStart = Now

Do Until DateDiff("s", dStart, Now) > iHowManySecs
'Waiting until number of seconds has passed
Loop

WaitExit:
Exit Sub

WaitErr:
Resume WaitExit

End Sub

Run the application and click the command button. A nice simple smooth scrolling progress bar.

Of course progress bars are most often used when looping through a recordset which we will cover in the future.

Progress Bar VB