Access Cookbook, 2nd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Recipe 9.2 Create a Form with No Menu or Toolbar

9.2.1 Problem

You'd like
to completely disable menus for a form, and the toolbar too. Is there
any way to remove menus and toolbars from a form?

9.2.2 Solution

If
you set the MenuBar property of a form to point to a macro in Access
that contains no macro actions, you can trick Access into not
displaying any menus. This solution demonstrates this trick and also
discusses how you can apply it to the global menus of an application.
In addition, you'll learn how to use VBA code to
remove a form's toolbar.

To create forms in your database without any menus, follow these
steps:

1. Create a new macro sheet without any actions. The
   mcrNoMenus macro sheet in
   

   09-02.MDB has no macro actions.

2. Create a new form or open an existing form in design view. Select the
   menu macro from Step 1 as the MenuBar property for the form.

3. Add the following Activate and
   Deactivate event procedures to the form to remove the toolbar for
   this form only:

   Private Sub Form_Activate( )
   DoCmd.ShowToolbar "Form View", acToolbarNo
   End Sub
   Private Sub Form_Deactivate( )
   DoCmd.ShowToolbar "Form View", acToolbarWhereApprop
   End Sub

4. Optionally, you may wish to
   also eliminate right-click shortcut menus for your form. To do this,
   set the ShortcutMenuBar property of the form to No.

5. Save the form.

To see an example, load the

09-02.MDB sample
database. Open the frmCustomerDefaultMenus form in form view and note
that the default Access menu and toolbar are available at the top of
the screen (see Figure 9-4). Close this form and
open frmCustomerNoMenus. Note the absence of any menu or toolbar for
the form (see Figure 9-5).

Figure 9-4. The frmCustomerDefaultMenus form with the default Access menu bar

Figure 9-5. The frmCustomerNoMenus form with no menu bar

9.2.3 Discussion

In early versions of Access, macros were
the only method of creating custom menus. Despite the newer Command
Bar menus and toolbars supported in recent versions of Access, you
can still create custom menus in Access by creating menu macros. When
you open a form with custom menus, Access reconstructs the custom
menus from the hierarchy of macros attached to the
form's MenuBar property. However, if you attach an
empty macro to the MenuBar property, Access creates a blank menu for
the form.

The ShowToolbar macro
action, which you call in VBA using DoCmd.ShowToolbar, enables you to
show or hide any toolbar. The code hides the default toolbar when the
form becomes active. The Deactivate code is equally
importantwithout it, that toolbar will remain hidden for all
subsequent forms that you view. The Deactivate event procedure tells
Access to show that toolbar again whenever it is appropriate.

You may want to eliminate menus for a
form to reduce the complexity of your application or to remove
potential chinks in your application's armor.
Whenever you remove built-in functionality from forms, however, you
must ensure that users of your forms can still perform essential
activities. For example, you wouldn't want to remove
menus and set the ControlBox and CloseButton properties of your form
to No

unless you have added either a toolbar
button or a command button that could be used to close the form.
Another alternative is to use the View Toolbars Customize dialog to
create your own menus and toolbars containing only the commands you
want to expose.

In addition to removing menus
for a single form, you can set the application's
default menu bar to point to an empty macro. Select Tools
Startup to set the default menu bar. In Figure 9-6,
we set the default MenuBar property of the Startup dialog to
mcrNoMenus, thus removing menus for all forms in the application for
which custom menus were not created. Another option is to uncheck the
AllowFullMenus property, which tells Access to remove all menu
commands that allow users to switch to design view.

Figure 9-6. The Startup dialog allows you to customize various default properties

You can also customize the
default shortcut menus using the Startup dialog by changing the
AllowDefaultShortcutMenus and ShortcutMenuBar properties.