Is there a grid control or other “n” numbered-item control for Outlook Forms?

Question

I'm developing an Outlook Form (2007) and I'm looking for a way to give the client the ability to enter an unspecified number of items - a grid, or some other way of doing this.

Is there a way to do this, or am I stuck with providing them with a fixed set of controls to enter items into?

Answer 1

It is not clear what the items are but from your suggestion of a grid I will presume they are values (numbers, strings, etc). If so you could almost certainly use something like comma separated values (CSV), or some other deliminator, for a standard text field.

In Outlook 2007 the To address field uses this functionality, in it the semi-colon is used to deliminate an 'unspecified number of items' - in this case email addresses.

This allows the user to enter data such as:

foo@bar.com; bat@baz.com; etc ...

Obviously CSV input would be:

something, something-else, etc ...

The other way to achieve this would be to dynamically generate the fields as required, that is programmatically build the form elements based on the user input, providing extra fields as required. For example, a simple system for multiple inputs might be work using the following logic.

Input entered -> check validity -> create new input

So that for each valid entry in a input, a new input is created below it, etc. thus allowing for an arbitrary number of input items.