User feedback using the Animate Control

In my last blog post, I described how to use the Progress Bar control to provide feedback to a user when running time intensive processes.  In addition to the Progress Bar control, the Animate control can also be used.

 Animate Control

The Animate control is very simple to use.  A number of animations are inlcuded to cover standard operations such as moving or coping and deleteing items, and some other additional animations.

After adding the control to the form, choose one of the standard animations from the “CommonAVI” property of the form.  I also set the visble property, and the Active property to false at design-time, so that I can turn both properties on in code to make visible and start the animation.

I’ve used my code example from last week, and included a call to a control named “Animate1” on the form.

Sub UpdateAccounts

Dim rs

Set rs = CreateObject(“ADODB.Recordset”)
With rs, pos

        pos = 0

         Set .ActiveConnection = Application.GetNewConnection
         .CursorLocation = adUseClient
         .CursorType = adOpenStatic
         .LockType = adLockOptimistic
         .Open “select * from Account where status <> ‘Open'”

         ProgressBar1.Max = .RecordCount
         ProgressBar1.Position = pos

         .MoveFirst

         Animate1.Visible = True
         Animate1.Position = True

         While Not (.Bof or .Eof)

             .Fields(“modifyuser”).Value = Application.BasicFunctions.CurrentUserID
             .Fields(“modifydate”).Value = Now
             .Fields(“status”).Value = “Open”

             .Update

             pos = pos + 1
             ProgressBar1.Position = pos

             .MoveNext
         Wend
         .Close

         Animate1.Visible = False
         Animate1.Active = False

End With
Set rs = Nothing

End Sub

 

In addition to the available preset animations, you can also use the Animate control to disaply an AVI file instead.  To do this, you’ll want to set the “CommonAVI” to aviNone, and then enter the path and file name for the AVI file you would like to display.  The Animate and Visible properties will function the same regardless of the animation source.

(the clock.avi under c:windows is a simple avi displaying a running count from 1 to 10.

That’s all there is to it. The Animate control is a very simple way to spruse up your views when performing time-consuming updates.  Thanks for reading! [:)]