VB.NET Inputbox - How to identify when the Cancel Button is pressed?

Question

I have a simple windows application that pops up an input box for users to enter in a date to do searches.

How do I identify if the user clicked on the Cancel butt

Answer 1

I know this is a very old topic, but the correct answer is still not here.

The accepted answer works with a space, but the user can remove this space - so this answer is not reliable. The answer of Georg works, but is needlessly complex.

To test if the user pressed cancel, just use the following code:

Dim Answer As String = InputBox("Question")
If String.ReferenceEquals(Answer, String.Empty) Then
    'User pressed cancel
Else if Answer = "" Then
    'User pressed ok with an empty string in the box
Else
    'User gave an answer

Answer 2

Dim userReply As String
userReply = Microsoft.VisualBasic.InputBox("Message")
If userReply = "" Then 
  MsgBox("You did not enter anything. Try again")
ElseIf userReply.Length = 0 Then 
  MsgBox("You did not enter anything")
End If

Answer 3

Here is what I did and it worked perfectly for what I was looking to do:

Dim StatusDate As String
 StatusDate = InputBox("What status date do you want to pull?", "Enter Status Date", " ")

        If StatusDate = " " Then
            MessageBox.Show("You must enter a Status date to continue.")
            Exit Sub
        ElseIf StatusDate = "" Then
            Exit Sub
        End If

This key was to set the default value of the input box to be an actual space, so a user pressing just the OK button would return a value of " " while pressing cancel returns ""

From a usability standpoint, the defaulted value in the input box starts highlighted and is cleared when a user types so the experience is no different than if the box had no value.

Answer 4

You can do it in a simpler way using the DialogResult.cancel method.

Eg:

Dim anInput as String = InputBox("Enter your pin")

If anInput <>"" then

   ' Do something
Elseif DialogResult.Cancel then

  Msgbox("You've canceled")
End if

Answer 5

I like using the IsNullOrEmpty method of the class String like so...

input = InputBox("Text:")

If String.IsNullOrEmpty(input) Then
   ' Cancelled, or empty
Else
   ' Normal
End If

Answer 6

input = InputBox("Text:")

If input <> "" Then
   ' Normal
Else
   ' Cancelled, or empty
End If

From MSDN:

If the user clicks Cancel, the function returns a zero-length string ("").