Accessing MainView Tabs at Runtime

MainView plugins have a TabsPane which essentially contains a collection of Forms, displayed as tabs, for the MainView. There are times when it is necessary to access the tabs programatically to be able to manipulate controls on the Form or set properties from other things that happen on the MainView. Fortunately, this is an easy task.

You could of course access the tabs from the Forms collection, but a more direct route is using the MainViews TabsViews collection. The TabsViews collection is a collection of Forms that make up the tabs on the MainView. You can iterate through the collection like so:

Dim view
Dim tab
Dim i

    Set view = Application.MainViews.ActiveView
    For i = 0 To view.TabsViewsCount - 1
        Set tab = view.TabsViews(i)

        ' Now tab is a reference to the Form object for each tab returned.
        ' You can access properties of the form or controls on it, just as
        ' if you retrieved the reference from the Forms collection.

        'ie
        If (Not tab Is Nothing) Then
            MsgBox tab.Caption & vbCrlf & tab.CurrentID

            'or something like
            tab.Refresh
        End If
    Next

Or you can access a specific tab by plugin name, just as you can from the Forms collection:

Dim tab

    Set tab = Application.MainViews.ActiveView.TabsViews("Quote:Quote Comments")
    If (Not tab Is Nothing) Then
        MsgBox tab.Caption & vbCrlf & tab.CurrentID
    End If

Once you have a reference to the Form via the TabsViews collections, you can get to the controls on that tab, set any properties on that tab or call form methods on that tab.

However, one thing that is missing from version 6.2, is the ability to dynamically add or remove tabs from the TabsViews collection at runtime. That really sucks.