VB Forum / General 2 / September 2004

I am creating a sort of menu bar.
What I have is an MDI window as my main application window.
I have a picturebox control aligned left.
Inside that is another picturebox control. This one, let's call it
picButtons, will contain any number of command buttons lined up
vertically with a bit of space between them. I am figuratively
emulating what you may have seen in MS Outlook - the "Outlook Bar."

I have seen some code online but it is very confusing. This is what I
now need:

At any time there may be any number of buttons in that picturebox. I
want to dynamically configure a vertical scrollbar at runtime so that
I may accomplish this:

When the user clicks the arrows, the inside picturebox will scroll up
or down in order to reveal more buttons. However, I want the min value
of the scrollbar, which will be reflected by the scrollbar being
scrolled "all the way up," to make the top of the inside picturebox
set at, let's say +120 twips in the container picturebox.
I want the max value, which will be reflected by the scrollbar being
scrolled "all the way down," to make the picturebox moved up to the
point at which all the buttons are visible, the last one being in a
position above the bottom of the container picturebox.

Some information that will be important in making these calculations:
My MDI form is sizeable, and therefore the container picturebox's
height increases and decreases dynamically... however:
The inside picturebox (picButtons) is sized at runtime - basically its
height is calculated as follows: the command button count * the height
of the command buttons (they are all uniform in height) + spacing
value (240 twips, eg:) between each button * button count.

For example, 6 buttons at 700 twips each = 4200
6 buttons with 240 twips between each = 6 * 240 = 1440  (I know
there's only 5 spaces of 240 but I am allocating a buffer of 120
between top and bottom of the picButton container)
Therefore I size the picButton at runtime to 5640.

My initial approach was to calculate based on the height of picButtons
and the amount of space needed for each button (700+240=940)
representing a button's "segment space"... I went on a wild tangent
from here, trying to figure out that subtracting the amount of
segments that can currently fit within the height of the mdi window's
scaleheight, leaves remaining the amount of picButtons that will have
to be above the top (ie: -xxx .top value)... I just cannot seem to
make the calculations work.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. I would be happy to share
the project file when I am done so anyone here can enjoy this code.

Any questions or if I have been unclear about any aspects, please let
me know and I'll clarify.

I can also send my project file over to anyone if you want to have a
look at it.

Thanks all.

---Atreju---