Touch screen monitors, for the most part, allow the user to interact with programs without using a mouse, and not surprisingly, almost all touchscreens are seen by the OS as a mouse. They connect via the serial port or the USB port, depending on the make/model.
I've developed applications that run without a mouse or keyboard.
Some things to note:
The touch screen simulates a single mouse click at the point where the screen is touched. You'll see the cursor move to that point on the screen.
Buttons respond as if clicked by a mouse.
If your application requires input of data without the presence of a keyboard, you'll need to implement a simulated keyboard (on screen).
You can create a VB form and add buttons to it, and you'll need that form to stay on top of all other windows.
You an use sendkeys to simulate keyboard strokes, but fucus becomes an issue.
The best solution I came up with involved hiding a text box in an invisible portion of the keyboard form... a timer kept focus on that field. Each keystroke on the touchscreen keyboard receives 1 character, then that character is sent to the form.field that 'had focus'.
in a module, create a public control variable:
Public FocusOn as Control
And wherever you need the text input to go, programatically set the variable to the name of the control:
set FocusOn = form1.text1
Your keyboard has an array of buttons. Each button's caption is the Letter of the key.
within the click event of the array, your code says:
focuson.text = command(3).caption
Whatever the caption is, be it letter a or 3 or whatever, that text goes to the field with the simulated focus.
Now, you have to provide a backspace key and a way to move from one field to another. So, for instance, if they pressed your backspace key (who's index is 23, you could pre-code that key to send the ascii code for backspace (isn't it 8, i don't recall off hand). For enter you can use chr(13) or chr(10) or both...
There's more to consider... I'll have to get back to you, but later on I can post a functional keyboard .frm file you can use.
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