Robert Crandal has brought this to us :
Sure, I probably wasnt very clear, so I'll try to just give
the basic gist of what I need.

I was basically wondering if Visual Basic for Excel 2007 has
some sort of data type that can hold a "set" of unique strings.
I would like to be able to add or remove strings from this set
and possibly iterate through the set of strings to see what the
set contains.

I realize that I could use an array of strings to implement a set of
of strings, but that seems to be overkill and possibly time consuming.
So, I'm basically wondering if Visual Basic provides some sort
of a "set" data type or datastructure?? Does that make sense?

Robert

Hi Robert,

That's a bit more helpful but doesn't answer my Q about a 'linked
list'. There is no data type that holds a 'set' of values as you
describe. There are structures you could use to store and manipulate
sets of data; namely an Array() or a Collection would be first chioces
for unknown values/size at runtime. Both of these would let you
add/remove/change the data however required. In both cases, you might
want to store the data in a file (possibly encrypted) so it can be
retrieved at startup and saved at shutdown.

The UDT structure might work for known members at design time but you
can only change the values at runtime (ergo you can't add/remove
members at runtime).

The easiest approach <IMO would be to use a variable defined as
Variant data type. This would allow you to manipulate the data using
VB[A]'s Split() and Join() functions as well as the Filter() function
to remove blank elements resulting from deleted data. I'd use a
delimited string for each record of data so it fits nicely into a one
dim array. Parsing each record is fairly easy and straight forward
using the Split() function.

Optionally, depending on how the storage is structured, you could use
ADO to manage the data in 'sets' based on criteria you define.

HTH

--
Garry

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