Determining whether an object is a member of a collection in VBA

Question

How do I determine whether an object is a member of a collection in VBA?

Specifically, I need to find out whether a table definition is a member of the TableDe

Answer 1

This is an old question. I have carefully reviewed all the answers and comments, tested the solutions for performance.

I came up with the fastest option for my environment which does not fail when a collection has objects as well as primitives.

Public Function ExistsInCollection(col As Collection, key As Variant) As Boolean
    On Error GoTo err
    ExistsInCollection = True
    IsObject(col.item(key))
    Exit Function
err:
    ExistsInCollection = False
End Function

In addition, this solution does not depend on hard-coded error values. So the parameter col As Collection can be substituted by some other collection type variable, and the function must still work. E.g., on my current project, I will have it as col As ListColumns.

Answer 2

Your best bet is to iterate over the members of the collection and see if any match what you are looking for. Trust me I have had to do this many times.

The second solution (which is much worse) is to catch the "Item not in collection" error and then set a flag to say the item does not exist.

Answer 3

I have some edit, best working for collections:

Public Function Contains(col As collection, key As Variant) As Boolean
    Dim obj As Object
    On Error GoTo err
    Contains = True
    Set obj = col.Item(key)
    Exit Function
    
err:
    Contains = False
End Function