The trouble with the maximise event

The first in an occasional series of rants by Chris Shepherd

When chatting to other developers and users I often find myself starting sentences with "The trouble with Access is.....". The purpose of this column is to get some of these problems out in to the open and to offer some possible solutions.

For my first rant I would like to look at the maximise event (or lack of it). A few weeks back I was watching some customers use my system. This is always a sobering thing to do and a very educational way to learn what does and doesn’t work on user interfaces. As an aside - next time you are designing parts of the user interface don’t explain what each part of the screen does, ask them to explain what they think each part does. This is a great way to discover that your nice clear screens don’t make any sense to the users at all.

Anyway I was watching my users and noticed that with a particular screen every user ran it maximised. What’s wrong with that I hear you cry. Well the trouble with Access is that you cannot detect when a user hits the maximise form button. You can detect if they drag the edges and make it larger then you can but lots of fun code in the resize event to resize all the controls. But there is no Maximise event and what is worse maximising a form doesn’t fire off the resize event. I confidently expect a mail at this point from some one telling me that I am labouring under a misapprehension, but until that time here are some thoughts about how to get round it.

The easiest way is not to bother with any resize code, if you are going to do this the first thing you must do is change the resolution of your screen to match that of the user with the lowest setting. There is something slightly embarrassing about demonstrating your nice shiny new data entry form and the users can only see half of it.

The second option involves writing all the resize code. For some unknown reason I always find this easier to do after three cans of lager, where as sober the code never seems to work properly/ Once you have the resize code working just switch of the maximise button on the form and let the users resize the form as necessary.

My preferred choice in this instance was to have the form always opened up in a maximised state (no mater what the users screen resolution) and to resize the controls as necessary. How do you get a form to maximise? Well you could try

The problem with this is that you are back to square one because you don’t know how big the screen is and the resize event doesn’t fire.

What you need is a way to maximise any given screen, rummaging around MSDN I found the following code for a MaximizeRestoredForm subroutine:

This can be called when opening a form or from a maximise button using the syntax:

Personally I keep this code as part of a utilities module (usefull97.mdb or usefull2000.mdb )available from this web site) which I add to each and every project I do. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to develop systems.

If you have any comments about this article or would like to suggest other niggles with Access please drop me a line at Mail Chris