Visual Basic Concepts

Step Eleven: Test your Application

At this point, you can run your project and retrieve data using the Show All Customers button on the Menu page, and you can navigate back and forth between the data retrieval pages and the Menu page.

To test the project

  1. Press F5, then click OK in the Project Properties dialog box.

  2. If a prompt appears telling you that a virtual root directory will be created for your project, change the name if you want to, or click OK to accept the default.

  3. Internet Explorer appears. The URL line for your webclass contains the base URL for your application, and the contents of your HTML file are displayed. You should see the Menu page.

  4. Click the button that says Show All Customers. A table appears with hyperlinks for each customer.

  5. Click the hyperlink for Janet Leverling. The Detail page should appear with information about Janet's account.

  6. Click the Back to Main Page link, then click Show All Customers again, and select another name from the table. You should see the appropriate record for the row you selected.

Moving On: What's Next?

The Menu page contains two buttons — Show All Customers and Show All Calls. In this tutorial, we've made the first button completely functional. You can now use the same techniques you learned in the course of this chapter to finish the application. In Step Six, we connected the ShowAllCalls button to a custom event of the same name. You can now do the following to finish the application:

  • Write code in the Menu_ShowAllCalls event to open the database connection, retrieve records, and generate a table containing the responses. This should be the same type of code you used in the ShowIDs_Respond event.

  • If you desire, you can add a hyperlink to each row in that table, and write code that generates a detail page for each row.

The full sample is available on the Web. You can download the entire sample and all of its associated files. The Show All Calls button is completely functional in the sample.