How to find out which report or form a control belongs to

[TheSmileyCoder]

Problem
Today I had an issue, trying to discover which report/form a given control belongs to. I needed to know this for some other code I am using.

At first I thought it would be so simple. Just use the .Parent property of the control.

More problems
However I soon realised that the .Parent does not always refer to the form/report. For a label for instance it refers to the Control to which the label is attached, and for a control such a textbox or combobox placed inside a tabcontrol the .Parent property refers to the page on which the control resides, and the pages .Parent property is actually the tab control So in some cases to get the form/report you might need to go through several objects to actually get the form/report.


Solution
So I wrote this short bit of code, which will go recursively check the parent of the control, until it finds a Form or Report object, and then return that.

Public Function GetControlParentObject(ctl As Control) As Object
'---------------------------------------------------------------
'---------------------------------------------------------------
' Procedure : GetControlParentObject
' Author    : AEC - Anders Ebro Christensen / TheSmileyCoder
' Date      : 2013-04-12
' Version   : 1.0
' Purpose   : Return the Form or report to which a control of any type belongs.
'---------------------------------------------------------------
'---------------------------------------------------------------
   If (TypeOf ctl.Parent Is Form Or TypeOf ctl.Parent Is Report) Then
      Set GetControlParentObject = ctl.Parent
   Else
     'Call self recursively on parent object
      Set GetControlParentObject = GetControlParentObject(ctl.Parent)
   End If
End Function

Hope someone else might find it useful.

Feedback, comments and discussions are always welcome.

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[Lysander]

I can't imagine how I would use this or why, but obviously you had a need, and this solution is simple and elegant. Love it.

[TheSmileyCoder]

Hi Lysander
Stephen Leban has a bit of code that can be used to estimate the size of a textbox. Parts of his code needs to get to the form/report handle, and in its original form it did not take into account unbound labels, or controls nested within other controls (such as a textbox in a tab control).

If you have looked at my Progress Monitor it also uses the above code to get the form object of a control, as part of a resizing process, in which controls beneath the expanding control are moved (similar to how reports object can grow). Yes you could workaround the issue by also passing the form as a parameter but this seemed more elegant (at least to me).