Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I clear a list box in an HTA?
— AK
Hey, AK. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, an HTA – among other things – is a way to use Internet Explorer to provide a graphical user interface for your scripts. (If that still doesn’t answer your questions, don’t despair. Instead, stay tuned for April 11th when we debut our new HTA Developers’ Center.) With an HTA (short for HTML Application) you can make your system administration scripts look – and run – like real applications, applications complete with radio buttons, text boxes, check boxes, and, yes, list boxes.
So suppose you do have a list box, one with a bunch of items (technically known as options) already in it. In other words, something that looks like this:
Suppose that you want to remove all of those options, leaving you with a nice, clean, empty list box. How can you do that?
To begin with, as far we know there’s no single command that can clear all the options in a list box. But that’s OK; even if we can’t clear all the options at once, we can clear the options one at a time using the RemoveNode method. All we have to do is iterate through the all the options in the list box and then delete each one. We can do that by adding a subroutine (in this case, a subroutine named ClearListbox) to our HTA:
Sub ClearListbox
For Each objOption in AvailableOptions.Options
objOption.RemoveNode
Next
End Sub
Note. This subroutine assumes that the list box we want to clear is named AvailableOptions.
As you can see, we create a For Each loop that loops through all the Options in the list box named AvailableOptions. For each option we find (and, remember, the options correspond to the items in the list box), we call the RemoveNode method to remove that option. By the time the For Each loop is done, we will have found – and removed – every item in the list box.
The only other thing we need to do is add a button to our HTA; this button, when clicked, will call the ClearListbox subroutine. Here’s some HTML that will add a button like this to our HTA:
<input id=runbutton class=”button” type=”button” value=”Clear Listbox” name=”run_button” onClick=”ClearListbox”><p>
That’s all we have to do. If we run our revised HTA and click the Clear Listbox button, all the options in the list box will be removed, and our HTA will look like this:
Breath-taking, isn’t it?
If you’d like to try this out for yourself, here’s code that will bring up an HTA with a list box pre-populated with 8 items. Click Clear Listbox and all 8 items will be deleted. To use this sample code, copy it, paste it into Notepad, and then save it with a .hta file extension (for example, listbox.hta). Then just double-click the file in My Computer or Windows Explorer, and see what happens.
Here’s the HTA code:
<html> <head> <title>Clear a Listbox</title> </head><SCRIPT Language=”VBScript”>
Sub ClearListbox For Each objOption in AvailableOptions.Options objOption.RemoveNode Next End Sub
</SCRIPT>
<body bgcolor=”buttonface”>
<select size=”8″ name=”AvailableOptions” style=”width:400″ > <option value=”1″>Option 1</option> <option value=”2″>Option 2</option> <option value=”3″>Option 3</option> <option value=”4″>Option 4</option> <option value=”1″>Option 5</option> <option value=”2″>Option 6</option> <option value=”3″>Option 7</option> <option value=”4″>Option 8</option> </select>
<p> <input id=runbutton class=”button” type=”button” value=”Clear Listbox” name=”run_button” onClick=”ClearListbox”><p>
</body> </html>
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