Painting Property

You can use the Painting property to specify whether forms or reports are repainted. Read/write Boolean.

expression   Required. An expression that returns one of the objects in the Applies To list.

Remarks

The Painting property uses the following settings.

This property can be set and applies only in Form view and is unavailable in other views.

The Painting property is similar to the Echo action. However, the Painting property prevents repainting of a single form or report, whereas the Echo action prevents repainting of all open windows in an application.

Setting the Painting property for a form or report to False also prevents all controls (except subform or subreport controls) on a form or report from being repainted. To prevent a subform or subreport control from being repainted, you must set the Painting property for the subform or subreport to False. (Note that you set the Painting property for the subform or subreport, not the subform or subreport control.)

The Painting property is automatically set to True whenever the form or report gets or loses the focus. You can set this property to False while you are working on a form or report if you don't want to see changes to the form or report or to its controls. For example, if a form has a set of controls that are automatically resized when the form is resized and you don't want the user to see each individual control move, you can turn Painting off, and then move all of the controls, then turn Painting back on.

Example

The following example uses the Painting property to enable or disable form painting depending on whether the SetPainting variable is set to True or False. If form painting is turned off, Microsoft Access displays the hourglass icon while painting is turned off.

Public Sub EnablePaint(ByRef frmName As Form, _
                       ByVal SetPainting As Integer)

    frmName.Painting = SetPainting
    
    ' Form painting is turned off.
    If SetPainting = False Then
        DoCmd.Hourglass True
    Else
        DoCmd.Hourglass False
    End If
    
End Sub