Visit the EZLife home pageOverview of the EZLife Wizard Control

Welcome to the EZLife Wizard Control, the professional ActiveX control for constructing wizards of all kinds. See the Getting Started topic for an introduction to getting the most out of the control.

Anatomy of a Wizard

The term wizard was coined by Microsoft some years ago, to mean any program or module that leads the user through a complex process, performing complex processing behind the scenes based upon simple user input. The Wizard user interface has largely been standardised to improve user familiarity, but constructing them has been difficult because of the lack of wizard frameworks. The EZLife Wizard Control provides just such a framework.

A wizard control sits on a form, which may be modal or modeless. The EZWizard control itself provides only the wizard navigation controls, not the pages themselves. For the pages, you simply create a control array using a container control of some sort - we provide the EZWizPage control to complement the Wizard control -  and supply it to the Wizard control using the PageControl or Pages properties. A Visual Basic add-in makes it easy to navigate the wizard's pages at design-time, and add, remove and reorder pages.

The user can enter each page of information before pressing the Next button, and return to previous pages using the Back button. To cancel the wizard, there is a Cancel button, and the Finish button tells the wizard to complete processing and close.

A rich set of events allows complex programmatic processing of the user's actions. The BeforeNext and BeforeBack events occur before a move, and may be cancelled; they are therefore ideal for page-level validation. The AfterNext, AfterBack and PageChanged events occur after a move; they may be used to prepare the controls on a page as it is selected, or to update the wizard's caption (title) bar. Finally, the Finished and Cancelled events are may be used to complete or abort processing.

One further feature of the wizard control is that it will automatically skip over pages which are disabled (Enabled = False). This allows for conditional inclusion of pages, and dynamically changing the wizard's process according to user input.

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Supported Platforms

The EZLife Wizard Control works with Windows 95, 98 and NT 4 (SP2+).

See Also: EZWizCtl Control
EZWizPage Control