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

Recipe 13.1 Replace Navigation Button Images with Your Own Images

13.1.1 Problem

The navigation section in a DAP uses
button images that are different from the rest of the pages on your
intranet. How can you use your own images on the navigation buttons
of a DAP?

13.1.2 Solution

The image on a navigation button is
named in the button's Src property. By default, the
Src property for each navigation button is set to an image stored
within the Office Web Component library. You can change the
property's value to name an image of your own
choosing. You can (and should) also provide an
"inactive" version of the image
that can be displayed when the button is not relevant to the current
context. For example, the First and Previous navigation buttons
should be disabled when the user is viewing the first record. The
code to change the image based on context has already been written
for you; you need only supply an image in the same location and with
the same name as the active version of the button, but with the
string "Inactive" appended to the
name. That is, you might have one image named

MyFirstButton.gif and another named

MyFirstButtonInactive.gif .

In order to try out the sample provided for this section, please see the introduction to this chapter, which describes how you can update the connection information and connect the DAP to the sample database.

To add your own images to the navigation buttons on a DAP, follow
these steps (or open 13-01.mdb to see the completed sample):

1. Create the images you want to use for the navigation buttons. The
   Previous and Next buttons for our sample page are shown in Figure 13-1.

Figure 13-1. Active and inactive versions of the Previous and Next buttons

2. Create a DAP and add whatever controls you'd like.
   Once you've added fields from tables or queries,
   you'll see a default navigation section like the one
   shown in Figure 13-2.

Figure 13-2. The default navigation section includes several buttons

3. Eliminate any buttons you don't want. For our simple
   example, we eliminated all buttons except the Previous and Next
   buttons. To get rid of a button, either select it and press the
   Delete key, or right-click the navigation control, select Navigation
   Buttons from the context menu, and toggle off the buttons you
   don't want.

4. Select a navigation button and display its properties sheet.

5. Find
   the Src property (in the Other page of the properties sheet). Change
   the property's value to the name of the image you
   want displayed, as shown in Figure 13-3. Note that
   the properties sheet seems to insist on storing the full path to the
   image, even when it is entered as a relative path.

Figure 13-3. Specify the image you want displayed in the Src property

6. Repeat Step 5 for each button you need to change.

7. Test the resulting page. Our sample page looks like Figure 13-4.

Figure 13-4. The look of our page is now consistent with the rest of our intranet

13.1.3 Discussion

All the functionality for a
navigation button is contained within the DataSourceControl Office
Web Component. The name of the image to use, though, is stored in the
HTML source of the page. The component itself checks for the name
with the "Inactive" string to
adjust the appearance of the button relative to the context.

The properties sheet appears to store a
full path to the image. That is, you might type in the following
text:

Images\ArrowLeft.tif

But when you leave the property, the value will be adjusted to show a
full path and filename:

c:\MyPages\Images\ArrowLeft.tif

Internally,
however, the HTML source is storing a relative path. If the path to
the page changes but it retains an

Images
subfolder, the page will not break; the image in the relative path
will still be found. (The same can't necessarily be
said of your data, of course.)