Chapter 1: Creating a Database for an Application


Overview

An application is more than just a database. Anybody with Access can create a database, but a database with a bunch of disconnected tables, queries, forms, and reports is not an application. An application consists of a database—or possibly several databases—containing normalized tables with appropriate relationships between them; queries that filter and sort data; forms to add and edit data; reports to display the data; and possibly PivotTables or PivotCharts to analyze the data, with all of these components connected into an efficiently functioning and coherent whole by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code. This chapter covers preparation for creating an application (getting and analyzing the information you need from the client), and creating tables to hold the application’s data.

Most Access books give you lots of information about Access database tables (and other database objects), but don’t necessarily tell you the stuff you really need to know: how to divide up the raw data you receive from a client into separate tables, how to decide what field type to use for each field in a table, and what relationships to set up between tables to create an efficient and well-integrated application. Through a series of developer-client Q&A sessions, I’ll show you how to extract the information you need to create the right tables for your application and link them into appropriate relationships.

I have always found it easier to understand a process by watching somebody do it, as opposed to reading abstract technical information about it, so in this chapter, I will explain what I am doing as I walk you through the preparation for creating an application and then the creation of its tables. Succeeding chapters will deal with creating the application’s forms, queries, and reports. Some technical information is necessary, of course, but it will be interspersed with demonstrations of what you need to do, and the explanations will tend to follow the actions, rather than precede them. Sometimes, if you can see how something is done correctly, that is all you need to know in order to do it right yourself, while an abstract technical explanation by itself is rarely adequate to teach you how to do something correctly.

There won’t be lots of step-by-step walk-throughs illustrating how to create database objects in this book, or long lists of properties and other attributes. I am assuming that you already know how to create tables, forms, and other database objects (and if you need detailed information, you know how to get it from Help), and that instead, what you need is help in making decisions on what kind of data goes into which table, how the tables should be related, and what types of forms, queries, and reports are best for working with the data in your application.

Although code is crucial to binding an application into a coherent whole, there won’t be any code in this chapter, because in Access, code runs from event procedures, and tables don’t have event procedures. Before writing event procedures, we need to create tables to hold the data, and that is what this chapter covers.




Expert One-on-One(c) Microsoft Access Application Development
Expert One-on-One Microsoft Access Application Development
ISBN: 0764559044
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 124
Authors: Helen Feddema

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