Validating a text box

[dougancil]

I have a form that has a text box that I want to only allow users to enter a date and then a MessageBox.Show stating that their data was submitted when they press a submit button. I know that you can do this with a regular expression validation but I have no idea how to do this in Visual Basic. Can anyone offer how to do that?

Thank you

Doug

[Kalen Viljoen]

To only allow them to enter the date you would have to watch the keyPress event. But you can check that what they entered is a date after they press the submit button by using:

If IsDate(TextBox1.Text) = True Then
MsgBox("You entered a date")
Else
MsgBox("Please enter a date")
End If

[BlackLibrary]

Are you restricted to just using a text box? Why not use the right tool for the right job. Use a datepicker.

In any case, watching the keypress will be tough, and you have to think ahead. Which format will they enter the date? January 3rd, 2011? 1/3/11? 01/03/2011?

You can't easily restrict the key presses as they are all over the place with that. IMO, your best bet, short of using a date control, is to allow them free entry, then on lost focus, test that value as such.

Take a look also, at the masked textboxes, if it must look like a text box.

Take a look, finally, at the link below. Its on how to convert the textbox.text (a string) into a date. Note, in all cases, "January 5th, 2011" will fail as a date. Cant convert string to date without parsing it.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w2sa9yss.aspx