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In certain cases in VBA (displaying the contents of folders, listing hierarchical data) writing a program which calls itself is by far the easiest way to go - this blog gives worked examples of 3 such recursive programs.
- Recursive Programming (this blog)
- Using Recursion to Display the Contents of a Folder
- Using Recursion to Show Hierarchical Breadcrumbs
- Using Recursion to Solve Factorials
This blog is part of our Excel VBA tutorial series of blogs (consider also booking on one of our Visual Basic for Applications courses).
Posted by Andy Brown on 20 February 2012
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Recursive Programming
The dictionary definition of Recursion says it all:
And if you didn't get (or like) that joke, here's a real definition: recursive programming is when you write a program which calls itself.
In practice there are few occasions when you'll actually use recursion - but when you do need it, it's nearly indispensable!
The examples this blog will show are:
| Example | Notes |
|---|---|
| Folder contents | Recursively looping over folders and subfolders |
| Creating breadcrumbs | Creating menu breadcrumbs for hierarchical data |
| Calculating a factorial | Calculating the factorial of a number |
Of these, it would be much harder to write the first two examples without using recursion.
- Recursive Programming (this blog)
- Using Recursion to Display the Contents of a Folder
- Using Recursion to Show Hierarchical Breadcrumbs
- Using Recursion to Solve Factorials