VB.NET Inputbox - How to identify when the Cancel Button is pressed?

Question

I have a simple windows application that pops up an input box for users to enter in a date to do searches.

How do I identify if the user clicked on the Cancel button, or merely pressed OK without entering any data as both appear to return the same value?

I have found some examples of handling this in VB 6 but none of them really function in the .NET world.

Ideally I would like to know how to handle the empty OK and the Cancel seperately, but I would be totally ok with just a good way to handle the cancel.

Answer 1

input = InputBox("Text:")

If input <> "" Then
   ' Normal
Else
   ' Cancelled, or empty
End If

From MSDN:

If the user clicks Cancel, the function returns a zero-length string ("").

Answer 2

Dim input As String

input = InputBox("Enter something:")

If StrPtr(input) = 0 Then
   MsgBox "You pressed cancel!"
Elseif input.Length = 0 Then
   MsgBox "OK pressed but nothing entered."
Else
   MsgBox "OK pressed: value= " & input
End If

Answer 3

You could just create your own simple InputBox form with just a textbox and a couple of buttons. Here is a quick example...

http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/103846-custom-inputbox/

Answer 4

Here is what I did and it worked perfectly for what I was looking to do:

Dim StatusDate As String
 StatusDate = InputBox("What status date do you want to pull?", "Enter Status Date", " ")

        If StatusDate = " " Then
            MessageBox.Show("You must enter a Status date to continue.")
            Exit Sub
        ElseIf StatusDate = "" Then
            Exit Sub
        End If

This key was to set the default value of the input box to be an actual space, so a user pressing just the OK button would return a value of " " while pressing cancel returns ""

From a usability standpoint, the defaulted value in the input box starts highlighted and is cleared when a user types so the experience is no different than if the box had no value.