Chapter 3: Access DevelopmentWithout VBA

Overview

Why would a book whose subject is programming with VBA have a chapter about not programming with VBA? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Before you go running to get your money back, you will quickly discover that I have a method to my madness (although my publisher will probably feel that there is madness to my method).

In the past six years or so, there has been a trend away from programming with more powerful programming languages. I am speaking about object-oriented programming environments in which the developer takes prebuilt programming modules, each of which does a specialized task, and plugs them into an existing system. For example, let’s say you need to format your numbers to currency format. You would not write the code to do it each time you needed it. Instead, you would take a prebuilt and tested module, called a Class file, and plug it into the system.

Writing code can be a costly and time-consuming process. The code must be designed, written, and debugged. If the project has limited resources or a short timeline, this can present a serious problem. Because much of the code is prebuilt and tested, object-oriented environments can reduce the cost and time of a project considerably.

Microsoft Access is not an OOP environment, but you can use the same concepts. By understanding the environment, you can greatly reduce the amount of code and subsequent debugging. Once you have pushed the database environment to its fullest abilities, you can then call in VBA to fill in the jobs that still need to be done.

In this chapter we are going to explore the relational database environment. We touch on file servers and the client-server system. From there, we examine the parts of a database application. We will continue our discussion, from Chapter 2, of relationships and modeling.

We are also going to continue with a subject that will be important when we begin to code in VBA: events. Finally, we explore prebuilt tools that we already have available in Access. Many of the concepts you will learn will be needed when we start to code in Chapter 5.