In Place Editing with Total Access Memo

Provided by the FMS Development Team

We’ve had many requests to allow end users of Total Access Memo to bold or italicize words without using our external FMS Rich Text Editor. So, we are going to show a brief example of how to programmatically allow users to do this.

First, you’ll want to have a Total Access Memo control on your form named “tamDemo”. Next, add a single button named “cmdBold” to the form.

We are going to set a variable to the actual Total Access Memo Control Object. By setting it to the Object, we will be using the Control's Object properties and not the built in MS Access Object properties.  For more information on why you want to do it this way, see our previous Tip #1: Finding Properties and Methods of an ActiveX Control.

Once we've set the variable, we will use the Total Access Memo Control property named  ".SelBold" to Bold the selected text. Now, let’s open the IDE and write a little bit of code:

' Bold the selected text in the control by using the SelBold property.
Private Sub cmdBold_Click()
 

  ' Create a variable to point to the Total Access Memo control
  Dim objFMSMemo As FMSMemo

  ' Get a handle to the memo control
  Set objFMSMemo = Me.tamDemo.Object

  ' Check to ensure some text is selected
  If objFMSMemo.SelLength > 0 Then

    If IsNull(objFMSMemo.SelBold) Then
      ' NULL indicates some bold and some not bold text are selected.
      ' If so, set all selected Text to Bold
      objFMSMemo.SelBold = True
    Else
      ' Set it to the opposite of what it currently is.
      objFMSMemo.SelBold = Not objFMSMemo.SelBold
    End If
  Else
    MsgBox "Please select some text", vbOKOnly, "FMS TIP"
  End If
End Sub

So, as you can see, the programmatic interface that our control has exposed for you, allows you to programmatically manipulate the Bold property of the text. You can also manipulate other properties such as Italics (SelItalic), Underline (SelUnderline), and more. These are only a few examples of the interface exposed for you to use. There are many more that you will find just as useful and very easy to implement as well.

If you'd like to see how we implemented the properties, methods and events available in the control, we invite you to download our Demo program that shows how to use the program. All of the code we wrote that implements these items is open for you to see how easy it is to write and utilize the code. Try the free FMS Total Access Memo trial today!