Selecting a form

The user's first task is selecting a form. Because the user could have multiple forms in progress at any given time, the application closes only the current document if it's obvious that the user has opened Word for this specific document. Consequently, the user will have to close any documents that aren't needed for a particular session.

Understanding differences between Content

Controls and Legacy Controls

Anyone who worked with forms in older versions of Office knows about the controls that Microsoft provides for creating forms. You simply add the controls you want to the page, configure them, and then add some VBA code as needed to perform required tasks in the background. It's still possible to use these controls in Office 2007, but you must look for them in a different location. The controls that you're used to working with appear on the Developer tab in the Controls group in a small button called Legacy Controls. When you click this button, you'll see a small window containing two areas: Legacy Forms and ActiveX Controls. To use a control, simply place the cursor where you want the control to appear on the form and then click on the control as you normally would.

Microsoft also makes it possible to add new ActiveX controls. For example, the form in the "Filling Out Forms" section of the chapter includes a Calendar control. To add this control to your form, click the More Controls button that appears at the end of the list in the ActiveX Controls section. You'll see the More Controls dialog box, where you can choose the Calendar Control 12.0 entry and click OK. Adding the Calendar control to your form doesn't add it to the ActiveX Controls list, so you must perform this action every time you want to use the special control.

Content Controls are new to Office 2007 and Microsoft has given them a prominent location in the Controls Group. These controls don't work like the form controls you used in the past. In fact, these controls are part of a new technology called Building Blocks that you can read about at http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft _office_word/archive/2006/11/21/ building-blocks-part-i.aspx

You can read more about how Building Blocks and Custom Controls work together at http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_ office_word/archive/2006/11/22/ inserting-and-swapping-buildingblocks. aspx

You can even create your own Building Blocks using information from the article at http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft _office_word/archive/2007/01/03 /creating-building-blocks.aspx

The special editor found at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/ View.aspx?ProjectName=dbe helps you manage and work with Custom Controls. Because this topic is so complex and is outside the scope of this book, you won't see any further references to either Building Blocks or Custom Controls in this book.

Creating the physical presentation

The user sees the gallery control when choosing a form. However, you don't provide any content for this control at design time. That's because you can't predict which forms the user's machine will contain. All content appears at runtime. Consequently, the XML for this example contains a lot of callbacks, as shown in Listing 6-11.

Listing 6-11: Defining the Gallery Content

<gallery id="FormList"



label="Available Forms"



imageMso="BusinessFormWizard"



size="large"



columns="2" rows="2"



itemHeight="100" itemWidth="180"



getItemCount="GetItemCount"



getItemID="GetItemID"



getItemImage="GetItemImage"



getItemLabel="GetItemLabel"



onAction="ItemClicked"/>

You do need to consider a few configuration issues when creating the <gallery> element. Notice how the code uses the columns and rows attributes to control the number of templates the user sees at any time. You need to provide some amount of control or the gallery could very well fill the screen, making a selection more difficult, rather than easier. It's also important to control the item size. Otherwise Word displays each of the templates at the full size you used to capture the image. You may have to spend some time figuring out the right size for the image. The user has to see what the form looks like, but you don't want the form full-size either. Maintaining the aspect ratio also helps in the recognition process. For example, if the screenshot height is 500 and the width is 900, and you reduce the height to 100 for display purposes, then you should set the itemWidth attribute to 180.

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