Tip 182: Temporarily Enabling or Disabling Tabs on the TabStrip Control

December 5, 1995

Abstract
This article explains how to selectively enable and disable specific Tab
buttons in a Microsoft? Windows? 95 application.

Enabling and Disabling Tab Buttons
The TabStrip control is one of the new controls provided in Microsoft?
Windows? 95. This control lets you organize information in an orderly
manner. For example, you could have a TabStrip control where one of the
Tab buttons presents a page of information for selecting your program's
default color options. Another Tab button could present a page where the
user can select the default printer he or she wants to use. To switch
between these two pages, the user simply clicks on one of the Tab buttons.

In some situations, however, you may want to disable one or more of the
Tab buttons temporarily from within your Microsoft Visual Basic?
application. The Tab button does not have an Enabled property, but you
can accomplish this functionality by maintaining such a state in code.

You can use a global array to keep track of which Tab buttons are enabled
and disabled. Each index in the global array corresponds to one of the
Tab buttons on the TabStrip control.

In your program, you check the global array index for a specific Tab
button. If it is "enabled," then the SelectedItem property can be used
to activate the code associated with that Tab button. On the other hand,
if that button has been flagged as "disabled," you force the currently
selected Tab button to remain the default Tab button not the Tab button
the user just clicked.

Note that this solution for enabling and disabling individual Tab buttons
does not prevent the actual click event from being triggered. The code in
the Tab button's Click event does not, however, get executed if the Tab
button is disabled.

Example Program
This program shows how to selectively enable and disable a specific Tab
button on a TabStrip control.

 1. Create a new project in Visual Basic. Form1 is created by default.
 2. Add a TabStrip control to Form1. TabStrip1 is created by default.
    Select the TabStrip control by clicking it. Click the right mouse
    button once to bring up the TabStrip control's pop-up menu. Click
    once on the Tabs option. Click on the Insert tab. Type the Caption
    as Tab1. Create four more Tabs with the Captions set to Tab2, Tab3,
    Tab4, and Tab5, respectively. Click the OK command button when done.
 3. Add the following code to the General Declarations section of Form1:

Dim PrevTab As Object
Dim TabState(1 To 5) As Integer
Dim FakeNext As Integer

 4. Add the following code to the Form_Load event for Form1:

Private Sub Form_Load()
    For i = 1 To 5 Step 2
        TabState(i) = True
    Next i
    Set PrevTab = TabStrip1.Tabs(1)
    FakeNext = False
End Sub

 5. Add the following code to the Click event for TabStrip1:

Private Sub TabStrip1_Click()
    If FakeNext Then
        FakeNext = False
        MsgBox "Cannot click on this TAB"
    Else
        For i = 1 To 5
            If TabStrip1.Tabs(i).Selected And Not TabState(i) Then
                FakeNext = True
                TabStrip1.SelectedItem = PrevTab
                Exit Sub
            End If
        Next i
        Set PrevTab = TabStrip1.SelectedItem
        MsgBox "Can click on this TAB"
    End If
End Sub

Run the example program by pressing F5. The TabStrip control appears on
the screen. Notice that you can click on the Tab buttons numbered 1, 3,
and 5. A message box appears telling you that you clicked one of these
three Tab buttons. However, when you click the second and fourth Tab
buttons, no click event is actually activated. A message box appears
indicating that you cannot click on the Tab2 or Tab4 button.


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