How do I access form controls in C#

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Hello!

I am writing a quiz program in C# and I'm at a bit of a loss on how I can compare the user's answers to the answer key. Basically, I want there to be 2 arrays (if my method is inefficient please suggest another way) one which stores the answer key and one which stores the user's input. So I want the user to type in their answers into textboxes and then the program will compare the textbox's text to the answer key... Basically like this:

C#

if (textBoxes[i].Text == answerKey[i]) { correct++; }
else { wrong++; }

Where, the correct and wrong variables keep track of how many questions the user got right and wrong and the answerKey array stores all the answers.

So my question is, how can I take all of the textboxes inside of my form and place them into the textbox array?

Posted 29-Jan-14 13:50pm

Ahsan Lopez

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Karthik_Mahalingam 29-Jan-14 20:15pm

post full code

Ahsan Lopez 29-Jan-14 20:21pm

Why would you need that? All I need to find out is how to take all the textboxes on my Form and put them into an array which I can compare with another array.

Karthik_Mahalingam 29-Jan-14 20:28pm

how many textboxes ?
what names you have used for that..

Karthik_Mahalingam 29-Jan-14 20:28pm

web or windows ?

Ahsan Lopez 29-Jan-14 20:34pm

Desktop on Windows. A lot of textboxes which is why I don't want to use individual if statements for all of them. I left the default textBox1, textBox2... etc names for them.

BillWoodruff 30-Jan-14 1:54am

100 TextBoxes in which the user can potentially enter any text is, imho, a recipe for a lot of work validating user input. However, if all the possible answers are numbers, that's easily handled.

Have you considered a Dictionary where the Keys are TextBoxes and the Values are the correct answers ?

If you give an example of one of your questions, and its possible answers, I'll say more.

2 solutions

Solution 1

Here's one possibility.

C#

// create list to hold textbox controls; our form contains four textbox controls
List<TextBox> textBoxes = new List<TextBox>();
textBoxes.Add(textBox1);
textBoxes.Add(textBox2);
textBoxes.Add(textBox3);
textBoxes.Add(textBox4);            

// iterate list and check textbox text against the answer keys
foreach (TextBox tb in textBoxes)
{
    if (answerKey.Contains(tb.Text)) { correct++; }
    else { wrong++; }                
}

Posted 29-Jan-14 14:44pm

idenizeni

Updated 29-Jan-14 14:47pm

v2

Comments

Ahsan Lopez 29-Jan-14 20:59pm

Thank you for your solution, however because I have almost 100 textboxes, adding all of them one by one into a List does not seem very efficient.

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Karthik_Mahalingam · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-29T14:45:00

Try this..

C#

int countAnswers = 0;
            List<TextBox> lstText =new List<TextBox> ();
            var controls = this.Controls.OfType<TextBox>().ToArray();
            for (int i = 0; i < controls.Length; i++)
            {
                if (controls[i].Name == "textBox" + i)
                    lstText.Add(controls[i]);
            }
            // make sure that the lstText has only 10 items

            string[] answers = { "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j" };
            for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
            {
                if (lstText[i].Text == answers[i])
                    countAnswers ++;
            }
            int countWrong = lstText.Count - countAnswers;