I want to disable and enable my application menus.  I know that if my menu caption or text is called 'Create Invoice' and the name is mnuCreateInvoice, I can do this in C# (this.mnuCreateInvoice.Enabled = false) to disable it.

Now, asuming the name is in a variable, i.e., ci = mnuCreateInvoice, what can I do to disable the menu now?  ci.Enabled = false does not work.  What should I do? I need help.

Your question is not making any sense. The actual name of the variable has absolutely nothing to do with the caption. All objects in C# are a reference, unless they aren't therefore if ci is set to mnuCreateInvoice and ci.Enabled = false is not working then that means something is going on. Several of the things that could possibly happen are:

#1 - either ci is null - and your "not working" really means to say throwing a NullreferenceException
#2 - ci is not being set to mnuCreateInvoice but is being set to something else
#3 - the code ci.Enabled = false is not actually being called

Sorry! The thing is, I have a table in MS SQL server 2000 having the following columns, UserID, MenuID, MenuName, MenuCaption.

Now what I want to do is, if I retrieve the user I want to process the menus that have to be enabled for him or her.  By default all the menu items are disabled.  So when I retrieve the user and his or her menus, I now put the menu name in the sql table in a variable.  The following is the sample code:

string menuToShow;

try

{

this.dsUserInfo.UserMenusView.Clear();

this.dsUserInfo.UserMenusView.BeginLoadData();

this.cmdSEUM.Parameters["@UserID"].Value = this.userID;

this.daGetUserMenu.Fill(this.dsUserInfo, "UserMenusView");

this.dsUserInfo.UserMenusView.EndLoadData();

if (this.dsUserInfo.UserMenusView.Rows.Count > 0)

{

foreach(DataRow urow in this.dsUserInfo.UserMenusView.Rows)

{

menuToShow = (string)urow["MenuName"];
***menuToShow.Enabled = true
}

but the code with the asterix (the *** is not part of the code, just to show the line) generates this error "string does not contain a definition for Enabled"

That is because menuToShow is a String not a MenuItem.

You have to now go through each menu item in your Menu and find an item who's name matches that string and then enable THAT Control