Advanced UserForm control

Hello friends and lovers of Excel.

For years I have build and use a control in my work that is an advanced UserForm for Excel that helps me to fast and error-free build Excel applications for different purposes from simple Excel workbooks as a template for invoices, to advanced applications. This advanced UserForm is in fact control that links Excel and other databases (Access, MySQL, MSSQL Server) in which, for example, are stored partners or items or ....
The user designs database, define tables, fields, relations (few minutes) Then this control in runtime builds complete responsive design of the form, grid and edit and master detail, tabbed relations, buttons, filter form ....
User only needs to write the business logic (if there is a need (calculations on validate, lost focus ...., before-after save,)) within the events that trigger.
This control is still in Croatian language and there is no installer and no documentation.
If you think that it will be some use for others in their work, I could translate it to english and create installer and documentation.

I will put some screenshots of this advanced UserForm.
If you think that there is some use for this please write your opinion.

Thank you, Davor

SC1.png

A lot of us are unable to see screenshots, images, photos etc. So we have no clue what you are trying to show us.

Hello dageci and welcome to the forum.

As described and shown in your picture it looks to be a very interesting use of Excel/VBA for more advanced form creation. This may well be useful to some here.

Is this something you are sharing freely or is there a commercial aspect to it?

Hello Richard, thank you for your reply.
I didn't decided yet. First I wanted to see whether it will come to be useful.

I have a bad past experience with free software. Don't get me wrong, they are great, but in some time when the developer had enough, the project is abandoned.
Donation model sounds very unprofessional.
Even if I publish it as open source there are tens of thousands of lines of code, and it is not the kind of project where the users themselves going through the code and correct errors and add new functions. The intention of this project is to quickly and efficiently enable users to help themselves in their work.
Through my experience in creating applications for the last 20 years, the worst is when you rely on a product and suddenly it stops to be maintained and supported. Frustrating and unprofessional.

In past I bought some products that have come with the source code, but man, it took me a lot of time and frustration to find what I'm looking for. Every developer has his own style of programming.
I would love that I can give this usercontrol free and establish a team of programmers to take care of users and develop new features in this control. But.....

What do you and others think:
donation model
free with no support and no further development (except sometimes when I find free time)
or commercial (and at what price)

I agree with Richard, although I'm unable to see the image, it does sound like it would be useful.

Hi,

You've clearly thought very carefully about all aspects of this. Not just the basic code for getting the forms created, but also how it it might be used in the real world and the potential maintenance and support problems that arise.

I know you mentioned design vs run time but do you see this as primarily for developers to create the forms for an application they wish to develop and once the application is issued with all the inbuilt forms the form design code and sheet definitions can be 'thrown away'?
i.e. in this mode no further support would be necessary - certainly not as far as the automatic form design aspect is concerned.

I suspect it would be more useful - and used in that way rather than letting any half interested amateur developer user start dabbling and building it in as runtime code to applications they design, with the consequential eventual maintenance problems that would arise.

Hello,
the project Virtual Forms consists of three parts. First is the usercontrol that is placed on the worksheet, the second is the stand-alone application Virtual Form Designer (abbreviation VFD) and the third is the 'DefinitionFile.vf' (the file that stores the definition data created with Virtual Form Designer (VFD) and used by VF usercontrol)
Usercontrol is having one property that is called DeveleperMode (True / False). By default in usercontrol it is False, but in VFD is True (if we open forms from VFD when we are developing our app)
If you protect the workbook and the VBA code the standard way that is provided by the Microsoft (password protect) the user can not change this property.
When you distribute your work, you don't need to distribute Virtual Form Designer stand-alone application (VFD) to the user.
If you want to be able to change and modify the Virtual Form on the user computer you can install the Virtual Form Designer (VFD) stand-alone application on a user machine. But you or your user still can't open the definition file with VFD if he doesn't know the password.
The initial password to enter VFD is blank (nothing) and if you change it, it is encrypted with an encryption method that I can not tell here. For now the encrypt/decrypt method uses a phrase, but I can change it to use maybe the serial key used to activate the VFD. In this case if someone doesn't know your password or serial number used to install VFD he can't get the password to enter the VFD app to change definitions even though he may know the encryption method. And if you protected workbook and VBA code he can't enter Developer Mode.


P.S.
Currently I'm translating the project to English in a way that will be possible to soon use language files also, if there is a desire to use virtual forms in other languages. Then I need to create the installation and maybe some videos on how to use it. Maybe in a week or two there will be something to play with if there are interested people.