Use array or variable for naming textbox object - powershell

Question

I am working on a program that has an unknown number of textboxes displayed.
These textboxes later will display data about different servers (ping data for ex.)
It is unknown because I don't know how many servers will be in work, they will be automatically selected from a list... it can be 2, 3 or 15.
The text boxes will appear in a new window that is sized according to the number of servers.
The problem is that I have difficulties referring to the textboxes later in the program.
My first attempt was this:
Created a function to display the textboxes:
function c_inputbox ($iname, $iposx, $iposy, $isizex, $isizey)
{
$iname = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.richTextBox
$iname.Location = New-Object System.Drawing.Size($iposx, $iposy)
$iname.Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size($isizex, $isizey)
$iname
}
Then I generate the textboxes, $objform1 is the main window, $x and $y are variables to position the textboxes in colums:
foreach ($srv in $stringArray)
{
$name = "textbox" + $i
$objform1.Controls.Add((c_inputbox $name $x ($y + 20) 350 100))
$i ++
}
It displayes the textboxes as I want but referring to the .text property doesn't work anymore. I tried several ways to test it:
$textbox1.text = "test"
$name.text = "test"
My second attempt was to store the names in an array, I tried even filling up the array with names before declaring the texboxes ($length contains the number of servers):
$j = 1
for ($j; $j -le $length; $j++)
{
$textbox[$j] = "textbox" + $j
}
So now the array should contain "textbox1", "textbox2", etc. Then I try to call them again to define them as textbox objects:
$textbox[$i] = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.richTextBox
$textbox[$i].Location = New-Object System.Drawing.Size($positionx, $positiony)
$textbox[$i].Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(350, 100)
$objform1.Controls.Add($textbox[$i])
But again PowerShell returns an error:
Cannot index into a null array.
+ $objform1.Controls.Add($textbox[ <<<< $i])
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (1:Int32) [], RuntimeException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NullArray
Any idea how to make this happen, or if it is even possible to do in PowerShell?

Answer 1

Create and assign the control to a local variable, configure it as necessary, then add it to an array before adding it to Form.Controls:
$TextBoxes = #()
for($i = 0; $i -lt $stringArray.Count; $i++)
{
# Create the textbox
$name = "textbox$i"
$textBox = c_inputbox $name $x ($y + 20) 350 100
# Customise it
$textBox.Text = $stringArray[$i]
# Add to array
$TextBoxes += $textBox
# Add to Form Controls, index -1 is the last item in the array
$objform1.Controls.Add($TextBoxes[-1])
}
Now you can use $TextBoxes to refer to the boxes, or $TextBoxes[$index] to refer to a specific one