Creating a Virtual Form for Data Row Labels

Background text on a form is useful for creating row and column labels. The labels can be placed outside the scrollable region or, in the case of column labels, in the border of the scrollable region. Problems occur, however, if the following situations exist:

• nEvery data row has a different row label.
  
  
• nThe scrollable region is on a virtual form and the user can move to an area of the form where the data row labels on the form are no longer visible.

When using a virtual form, the background text you create for data row labels may be scrolled out of the form window. To prevent this, you can create another, smaller virtual form containing row labels to appear on the screen simultaneously, as shown in Figure 10.3.

Figure 10.3: Scrolling Data Row Labels with a Scrollable Region

The smaller virtual form on the left contains only background text for the data row labels; this virtual form would have the same number of data rows as the scrollable region. The large virtual form on the right has a scrollable region that covers the entire virtual form. When the user scrolls vertically through the data rows on the scrollable region, you would scroll the smaller virtual form on the screen, as discussed below.