How To Load A Non-Modal Form Like A Modal Form

Background

I was almost finished with an app I was writing. Twice in this app I did some time consuming formatting and I thought it would be nice to have a status bar in these loops. My program had Modal windows so the problem begun. I could not show a non modal window on to of a modal window and if I loaded a Modal window I could not execute the code in the current module. I did not want to put the code in the status window because there were 2 big loops that had to be in the modules they were. So this is what I found. You can show a window non-modal with the SetWindowPos call from windows. By showing the window with this call I had two windows that could get the focus so I had to disable the first form and I just did that with Me.Enabled = False. When the loop was finished I just Enabled my for again and unloaded the status form.

Code

Global Declare:

Declare Function SetWindowPos Lib "User" (ByVal hWnd As Integer, ByVal hWndInsertAfter As Integer,
  ByVal X As Integer, ByVal Y As Integer, ByVal cX As Integer, ByVal cY As Integer, 
  ByVal wFlags As Integer) As Integer

Global Const SWP_NOMOVE = &H2

Global Const SWP_NOSIZE = &H1

Global Const SWP_SHOWWINDOW = &H40

Global Const HWND_TOP = 0

The loop:

Sub DoAnyThing ()

     ' Show the status window

     i = SetWindowPos(frm_Status.hWnd, HWND_TOP, 0, 0, 0, 0, 
                        SWP_NOSIZE Or SWP_NOMOVE Or SWP_SHOWWINDOW)

     ' Disable Me

     Me.Enabled = False

     DoEvents

     ' Do the loop

     For I = 1 To 200

           ' do stuff

           ' set the status

           frm_Status.pic_Status.Line (0, 0)-(I, 100), QBColor(1), BF

           frm_Status.pic_Status.Refresh

           DoEvents

     Next I

     'Unload the status window

     Unload frm_Status

     ' Enable Me ...

     Me.Enabled = True

     ' and give me the focus

     Me.SetFocus

End Sub

 

Tip Submitted By: Olafur Orn Jonsson