Use a Variable to Retun an Element from a Type Array

I have several type structures that have many element names in common. Currently to deal with that I have a bunch of select cases to determine which type to use and then get the proper element. To avoid all the case statements it occurred to me I could use the replace function - but I can't get this to work. Here is a way dumbed down section of code to illustrate my requirement:

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What I would like to do is replace the "X" in "T.X" to get the T.lTest element. The above code gets a vartype error as my evaluate is returning a string. I tried to replace the quotes with another replace using chr(34) but that didn't work either.

SNB, I think this ones for you?

Thanks,

Thick fingered double post of the following.

I see a User Defined Type called Test, that has 3 elements (lTest, iTest, and sTest).

It looks like the question you want answered is "given a variable V of type Test, and a value x, which element of V has a value of X"?

Your Select Case construct is probably the best way to approach this.

Mike,
Thanks for the quick response. I have 5 different types and they have at least 20 elements in common. This forces me to do the 5 case select case construct 20 times! It works but it is ugly, if I could find a way to get to the type via a variable I would only have to do the case once. I suspect I don't have a choice but I had to ask. I have seen SNB do some really wild stuff with replace so hopefully he will take a gander at this post.

Regards,

You could use a class instead of a user defined type, then you could use CallByName.

Class Module : TEST

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Standard Module

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Norie,
That's a great solution. However, the actual UDTs are from WINAPI and it won't accept classes in lieu of UDTs.

Thanks,

There is no equivalent for UDTs that I know of - Evaluate will not work here.

Can you give a specific example of why you need this, and how you are coding it now? Would it help to put the common fields into a new UDT and have that as a member of each relevant UDT?

Rory,
It's really a long story (and several hundred lines of code) but I am trying to set a dozen or so extended printer settings (like NUP) which requires manipulating DEVMODE types. In my code there are 5 different DEVMODES based on Universal vs. PostScript and also Windows versions. Snippet of the code (reduced DEVMODES to 3 and features to 3 for ease of viewing) looks like this:

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While this method works, what I am trying to avoid are the interior cases which have to be repeated for each feature. I was hoping there was a way (such as evaluate and replace) to replace each of these cases with a single line that would set the feature to the correct DEVMODE.

I had previously tried your type within a type method but that doesn't help with this particular issue.

Note: I played around with conditional compiling but that won't work as I don't know the printer driver type (and thus DEVMODE type) until well into program execution.

Thanks,

The best I can think of at the moment is to use classes as Norie suggested, which at least removes a lot of the Select Case coding. For example:

Class DM_A:

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The other DEVMODEs would need similar classes.

Then your routine becomes something like:

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Where you now pass the feature as a string:

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Would that help at all?

Note: you could probably also just have one class with all the possible properties and 5 separate properties for accessing each of the relevant DEVMODE types within the class.