Ribbon Builder

[speakers_86]

Attached is a ribbon builder. It easily creates new ribbons from scratch, or takes something you made and imports it to a gui for easy editing. It also has a treeview to make it easy to navigate your xml.

This is version 0.1. Future updates will likely only be seen in Aphrodite.

A few notes.
The ribbons are not stored in USysRibbons. You can change that, or load the ribbons via code. The ribbon's 'friendlyName' is a remnant of Aphrodite. It is irrelevant, unless you want to select the main Access ribbon from a form.

This is not 100% correct, because it is only v0.1 I wouldn't want to spend the time making it 100% anyway because Access itself is subject to change.

This is not 100% automated, but I have no intention of making it like that. Part of what this should do is help people new to xml understand how to write it.

Feel free to message me with bug reports.


Required references:
Microsoft XML
Microsoft Windows Common Controls

 

[speakers_86]

This is an add-in now!

Installation Steps:
1. Install the msi
2. Place the .mda file on your desktop (for me it only worked on the desktop, dunno why, just make it hidden)
3. Add the .mda file as an addin. To do this,
-go to your office folder, something like C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Office\12.0\
-right click on Access.exe, run as admin
-add the .mda addin
exact steps for the last may differ. In 2010, its Database Tools tab>Addins>Add-in Manager

Once you have done this, create a new shell and play with your new tabs! Super easy to make a ribbon with this. It even helps with the vba part too.

If you use it regularly and you suddenly experience an odd issue, you may need to decompile the .mda.

 

[speakers_86]

What this does is adds a tab to the ribbon. The buttons on the ribbon give you a graphical user interface to build XML and code stubs that drive your ribbons. It does not modify your database except for creating USysRibbons if needed, two other tables that should remain local tables (not in the backend), and it will create a new module with a name based on the name of your ribbon if you click the button labeled "code".

It also gives you imageMsos for 2007 and for 2010. Clicking the imageMso in the ribbon will copy the id to your clipboard.

I fixed the issue where Access would stay open in the task manager. If you installed any previous versions you should completely remove them before installing. If you have the RibbonGui.mda lying around anywhere you can get rid of it and any references to it as well.

If you choose to create your ribbons directly in RibbonGui.mda you can, though I'm not sure I can see why you would want to.

 

[speakers_86]

Attached is my ribbon builder. It provides a graphic user interface for building ribbons. It even assists with writing code stubs. Just install this and open any database. There will be a new tab in the ribbon.

This will create three tables in your database and one reference. The reference is only needed at design time. You can remove it before you deploy.

Please PM me any issues or suggestions.