TextBox.Name

There's no easier way to my knowledge in .NET 1.0 / 1.1.

In .NET 2.0 it's easy because they provided an overload of the Controls property which takes the Name of the control rather than its index.

Unless you have a lot of controls on the form it should still work pretty quick.

But it has to cycle through all the controls everytime. Theres not a straight shot way?

The code which I posted earlier (for .NET 1.0/1.1) does in fact do it individually:

foreach (Control c in this.Controls)
   {
      if (c is TextBox && c.Name == name)
      {
         TextBox txtBox = (TextBox)c;
         txtBox.Text = "This is a test";
         break;
      }
   }

It looks through all the controls on the form till it finds a TextBox with a Name property which is the same as the name which you've just parsed out from the argument to the method.

It then casts that control to a TextBox, sets its Text property and breaks from the foreach loop which effectively ends the method. The method can then be called again with another argument.

I take it that the method is defined inside the form class and not in some other class?

The textboxes are public and im looping outside of the function call so I need to do it individually.

So:

private void writeToApp(string readIn)
{

   int index = readIn.IndexOf(@"=");

   string name = readIn.Substring(0, index) + "_text";

Control c = TextBox or something;

   
     // if (c is TextBox && c.Name == name)
      //{
         TextBox txtBox = (TextBox)c;
         txtBox.Text = "This is a test";
         
     // }
   thanks

Ah, in that case , you need something like this.

// .net 2.0 or gretaer

private void writeToApp(string readIn)
{

   int index = readIn.IndexOf(@"=");

   string name = readIn.Substring(0, index) + "_text";

   TextBox txtBox = (TextBox)this.Controls(name);

   txtBox.Text = "This is a test";

}

// .net 1.0 or 1.1

private void writeToApp(string readIn)
{

   int index = readIn.IndexOf(@"=");

   string name = readIn.Substring(0, index) + "_text";

   foreach (Control c in this.Controls)
   {
      if (c is TextBox && c.Name == name)
      {
         TextBox txtBox = (TextBox)c;
         txtBox.Text = "This is a test";
         break;
      }
   }
}

The code assumes the TextBoxes have been placed directly on the form. If they're in some other container such as a panel, then replace 'this' with the container object reference so you can index into, or iterate through, the Controls collection for the container.

Sorry, wasnt specific enough. The textbox already exists. The name of the textbox is  oneLayer.

So I want oneLayer.Text = "this is a test" in the form.

I know that I could do a case statement for all the text boxes, but that defeats the dynamic purpose.

Thanks.

When you're adding controls at runtime, you need to set properties such as Size and Location and add them to the form's Controls collection before they can be displayed. Something like this:

txtBox.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(200, 50); // or whatever

txtBox.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(100, 20);

this.Controls.Add(txtBox);