Saving the state of controls.zip

[RichardJ]

The question of how to save the state of controls in a Mathcad worksheet comes up so often I decided to post the answer somewhere I can easily find it and post a link to it!

There are two approaches:

1)  Save the state of the control in the worksheet custom metadata. This  method will work in versions 13, 14 and 15, but not in versions 11 or  earlier (I"m not sure about version 12).

2) Save the state of the control in a textbox. This will work in all versions 11 and later, and maybe some earlier versions too.

There are some things to be aware of when using them.

Firstly,  in version 11 if the result of calling a function is not displayed, and  it's also not assigned to any variable, Mathcad does not calculate it.  That means that if you use method 2 and put the SaveData function in a  collapsed area it will not work. In version 12 and later they removed  this optimization, and therefore it will work.

For  the second method, if the Listbox is off screen at start-up and there  is a calculation using the output from the Listbox in a collapsed area  then Mathcad appears to generate a new (blank) Mathcad process on the  windows taskbar. This problem applies only to version 12

Saving  the state in the custom metadata causes another Mathcad.exe process to  be started. There is at least one report that in version 14 Enterprise  Edition (this does not apply to the Single User Edition) this new  Mathcad.exe process requires an additional license, so you get a popup  error every time you run the program. I don't know if this has been  fixed for later service releases of version 14, but it does not occur in  version 15.

Saving  the state of the control in the custom metadata will not work if the  control is in a referenced worksheet (because it can't see the  metadata). Method 2 will work if the control, and SaveData function, are  in a referenced worksheet.

Method  1 is much slower (about 6 times slower!) than method 2. This doesn't  matter much if you have only one control, but it can make a big  difference if you have a large number of them.

04 Feb 12: Added listboxes that are dynamically filled from an input.

07 Nov 2014: Added a checkbox that saves it's state in custom metadata.

14 Nov 2014: Improved the dynamically filled listboxes to take a scalar input for a single element list.

[ptc-4438750]

Just wondering on how to implement what you're presenting here. On the surface level it seems pretty easy, but when I try to recreate it in my own worksheets it doesn't work. I looked at the coding for your function and controls, and it's apparent that things are not as they first seemed. I don't know much about programming, so it makes it seem as though a lot went into this. So when getting this to work in my own sheet, is this meant to be an example and should be personally coded each time, or can it just be copied directly?

[RichardJ]

You do not need to change the script inside the controls. Just copy the controls into your worksheet. The version that saves the state in the worksheet metadata is less confusing, so as long as your version of Mathcad supports metadata you should probably use those controls.

If you can't get it to work, post the worksheet to the forums. I will be out of the country from tomorrow until July 6th, but someone else can probably show you what the problem is.

[ptc-4438750]

That's great. Thanks!

[ptc-6733605]

Do you have an example with a checkbox?

[RichardJ]

I do now

[ptc-6733605]

Thanks a lot!

[NM1]

Thanks for the single input option. Had been struggling for a while trying to get that working.