VBA Validation List Error - list

Question

I am pretty new to programming in vba. I need some coding help which I am not able to find the solution after I tried Googling for the solution.
Currently I have a self-defined type called category mapping. The type will be used to contain the items which I want to put as the option for the vadliation list. It looked as below:
Public Type categoryMapping
messageKey As Long
description As String
End Type
An example of the categoryMapping is to store gender codes, 6000 stands for Male, 6001 stands for Female.
Display of the Validation List
As I have all stored them in an array, displaying them is not easy. What I have done is as below:
'Validation drop down list for the whole row
If Has_Elements(mapping) Then
Dim code As String
Dim options() As categoryMapping
code = ""
options = mapping
Dim j As Integer
For j = LBound(options) To UBound(options)
code = code & options(j).messageKey & ": " & options(j).description & ","
Next j
With Range(Rows(7).Address).Validation 'TODO: Need to refactor
.Add Type:=xlValidateList, _
AlertStyle:=xlValidAlertStop, _
Operator:=xlBetween, _
Formula1:=code
.InCellDropdown = True
.InputMessage = "Please choose from of the following"
.ShowInput = True
End With
End If
Is there a easier to display them since I have already put all the item to be displayed into a array? Is it possible that I can call the array directly?
Use Cells
From the code above, it can be seen that I have use the address of the whole row to contain validation list, because actually what I want is the whole row, except the header cells to contain the validation list.
With Cells(7,1).Validation 'TODO: Need to refactor
.Add Type:=xlValidateList, _
AlertStyle:=xlValidAlertStop, _
Operator:=xlBetween, _
Formula1:=code
.InCellDropdown = True
.InputMessage = "Please choose from of the following"
.ShowInput = True
End With
I tried using the code above to do, but it fails. Is there any way to go about doing it?
Combine multiple validation delete
Due to the problem mentioned above, I need to put in the code to delete the validation list for some column, as shown below:
'Delete the unneccessary validation
'TODO: refactor the code so that write in 1 line
Range(Columns(1).Address).Validation.Delete
Range(Columns(2).Address).Validation.Delete
Range(Columns(3).Address).Validation.Delete
Range(Columns(4).Address).Validation.Delete
Is there some ways that I can combine all the delete validation into a single statement?
Display part of the option
As you can see from above, when my users select a option from the validation list, the whole string appear.
For example, if I have "6000: Male" & "6001: Female" as the option, and I choose Male, I wished for "6000" to appear instead of "6000: Male". Is there a way to do it?
Validation data not exist after reopen
After I generate the validation list, I close the program and reopen it, there is a error that say "Excel found unreadable content in 'File name.xls'. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.
When I click Yes, my excel open but all my validation list is gone! And I got the below as a error message.
-
error064240_01.xml
Errors were detected in file 'file_name'
-
Removed Feature: Data validation from /xl/worksheets/sheet2.xml.part
I was guessing that the error occur because the option in the validation list is not stored in the worksheet, but it is stored in the program memory, hence when I closed the program, the memory is loss.
If my guess is correct, is there any way to go around solving this problem? I was thinking of creating another worksheet that contain all the data in the validation list and let my cell validation list refer to them, but is there better ways to store them in the same worksheet?

Answer 1

The unreadable content is because you are storing the validation list in an array in memory. As soon as you close the worksheet, that array goes out of scope and ceases to exist. Rather than storing it in an array, write the list to a worksheet somewhere, I normally create a new sheet called lists.
The actual validation for your cell won't use VBA. Just create a dynamic named range (using offset() and counta() to populate your validation list from the relevant column in the lists sheet. Then use your VBA code to write the array above to that column. (http://chandoo.org/wp/2010/09/13/dynamic-data-validation-excel/)
As far as displaying different text in the validation and the dropdown, that sounds like more trouble than it is worth. Is it possible to just resize your cell so it only shows the first 4 digits?