User-defined Types

In Visual Basic, you can declare you own types or classes in a module or form. This will then behave as any other object in Visual Basic, except it only has properties. For example, the Screen object in Visual Basic exposes a number of properties, including FontCount and ActiveControl. These can be accessed by entering Screen.FontCount. You can create a custom version of this, that will allow you to define various elements that can store values. For example:

Type EmployeeRecord    ' Create user-defined type.
    ID As Integer    ' Define elements of data type.
    Name As String * 20 ' Fill with 20 spaces
    Address As String * 30 ' Fill with 30 spaces
    Phone As Long
    HireDate As Date
End Type

This user-defined type has 5 properties. At the moment you cannot access them, as Visual Basic requires that you declare another variable that is referenced to this user-defined type:

Dim MyRecord As EmployeeRecord

Note that if you want to declare a Type in a form, it must be declared as private. So, the following code fills a few values into this user-defined type:

Private Type EmployeeRecord    ' Create user-defined type.
    ID As Integer    ' Define elements of data type.
    Name As String * 20 ' Fill with 20 spaces
    Address As String * 30 ' Fill with 30 spaces
    Phone As Long
    HireDate As Date
Private End Type

' Reference variable to user-defined type
Dim MyRecord As EmployeeRecord    ' Declare variable.

' Comment1_Click event.
Sub Command1_Click()
    ' Assignment to EmployeeRecord variable must occur in a procedure.
   
    MyRecord.ID = 12003    ' Assign a value to an element.
    MyRecord.Phone = 1813670690
End Sub