Visual Basic.NET How to Program (PDF)

Chapter 17 Files and Streams 783
(The user must click Next Record to view the first record after opening the file.) Lines
68–69 call method Deserialize of the BinaryFormatter object to read the next
record. Method Deserialize reads the data and casts the result to a CRecord—this
cast is necessary, because Deserialize returns a reference to an instance of class
Object (not of BinaryFormatter). Lines 72–79 then display the CRecord values in
the TextBoxes. When method Deserialize attempts to deserialize a record that does
not exist in the file (i.e., the program has displayed all file records), the method throws a
SerializationException. The Catch block (defined in line 82) that handles this
exception closes the FileStream object (line 84) and notifies the user that there are no
more records (lines 92–93).
To retrieve data sequentially from a file, programs normally start from the beginning
of the file, reading data consecutively until the desired data are found. It sometimes is necessary
to process a file sequentially several times (from the beginning of the file) during the
execution of a program. A FileStream object can reposition its file-position pointer
(which contains the byte number of the next byte to be read from or written to the file) to
any position in the file—we show this feature when we introduce random-access file-processing
applications. When a FileStream object is opened, its file-position pointer is set
to zero (i.e., the beginning of the file)
Performance Tip 17.3
It is time-consuming to close and reopen a file for the purpose of moving the file-position
pointer to the file’s beginning. Doing so frequently could slow program performance. 17.3
We now present a more substantial program that builds on the the concepts employed
in Fig. 17.11. Class FrmCreditInquiry (Fig. 17.12) is a credit-inquiry program that
enables a credit manager to display account information for those customers with credit
balances (i.e., customers to whom the company owes money), zero balances (i.e., customers
who do not owe the company money) and debit balances (i.e., customers who owe
the company money for previously received goods and services). Note that line 18 declares
a RichTextBox that will display the account information. RichTextBoxes provide
more functionality than do regular TextBoxes—for example, RichTextBoxes offers
method Find for searching individual Strings and method LoadFile for displaying
file contents. Class RichTextBox does not inherit from class TextBox; rather, both
classes inherit directly from MustInherit class System.Windows.Forms.Text-
BoxBase. We use a RichTextBox in this example, because, by default, a Rich-
TextBox displays multiple lines of text, whereas a regular TextBox displays only one.
Alternatively, we could have specified multiple lines of text for a TextBox object by setting
its Multiline property to True.
1 ' Fig. 17.12: CreditInquiry.vb
2 ' Read a file sequentially and display contents based on account
3 ' type specified by user (credit, debit or zero balances).
4
5 ' Visual Basic namespaces
6 Imports System.IO
Fig. 17.12 FrmCreditInquiry class is a program that displays credit inquiries
(part 1 of 7).