Product: Component Toolbox OCX 4.0

Summary: Component Toolbox OCX 4.0 is a set of 54 ActiveX controls that will enhance your applications and ActiveX web pages. It includes sample applications for Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, and Access. Web page samples are in the works but not available as of this review.

Suggested List Price: $299.00 (site licenses are available)

Most of Visual Developer Magazine’s readers are always conscious of their user interface designs. Component Toolbox (CT) from dbi technologies is all about the user interface. The fifty-four custom controls included with CT can enhance everything from the lowly CheckBox to the complex TreeView control.

Perhaps I should say replace or enhance. Many of these are all-new controls with their own custom properties, methods, and events, but some duplicate existing controls while adding functionality. Such controls include the transparent button, diamond checkbox, color picker, hyperlink label, enhanced listview, menu notification, animated button, lined-paper textbox, auto-sizing frame, spiral-ring tabs, and more.

Completely new controls include animated and rotating text, popup calculator, clock, stereo dial, daytimer calendar, ruler, scheduling bars, tray icon, wave player, and more. The ruler and scheduling bar controls struck me as especially useful. They can be combined to provide simple scheduling or range selections to any application. Ranges are usually defined as a start and end value, but the scheduling bars could be used to visually select a range.

Another innovative control is the lined-paper textbox. You can combine this with the spiral-ring tab control to create a notebook interface such as for a memo field or a diary application.

One thing that struck me while testing this package was the designed simplicity and focus of each control. Some are a bit more complex, like the enhanced TreeView and ListView, but most sport an intuitive property interface and easily understood events and methods. Useful samples are included for every control. Looking through the samples illustrates how easy they are to use. Only a few lines of code are needed to create useful applications with these controls.

Many people have asked me how to make VB controls do the kinds of things that Component Toolbox controls are capable of doing automatically. The explorer-style ComboBox is one such control. It can automatically keep a history list, move selected items to the top, and look up entries based on what you type. The Form Effects control can provide gradient backgrounds and tiled bitmaps. The Size control is one of the few that take a bit more code to get working properly. It can automatically resize other controls when the form size changes, but some object types must be manually resized when an event fires.

Two of the controls are more advanced than the others – the TreeView and ListView. These two enhanced controls can behave just like their Microsoft counterparts, but they also have many unique capabilities. Both can be used as virtual data controls – that is, their data can be stored by any means the programmer desires. This can increase the speed of data presentation and dramatically increase the overall capacity of the control. A ListView, for example, starts to really bog down after loading it with over 100 meg of data. Using the CT ListView, you can keep the data on disk and only load it as the control requests it.

The graphic interface capabilities of the CT TreeView and ListView are great enhanced. You can define column colors and fonts and add pictures and option buttons. The programming interface to both controls is a bit more intuitive than Microsoft’s controls. No need to dimension a node before adding data – the Add method returns the index of the new item. Separate Add methods are available for graphical and standard data items. They have more methods and properties than the controls they replaced, but I’ve found them easy to understand and use. Help files are always an essential part of any tool, and each CT control has its own, well organized help file.

Component Toolbox provides programmers with the means to easily enhance their applications. Just looking through the provided demos will give you new interface and application ideas. The controls behind those demos are fast, small, stable, easy to use, and include excellent help files. Download the demo from dbi-tech.com and discover how easy it is to build a better interface.