Tuesday, March 17, 2009

My Treeview Project | Episode 6: Images for the Nodes

This (at long last) is Episode 6 of My Treeview Project.

  • In Episode 1 we started with the "Hello World" treeview
  • In Episode 2 we built a treeview that showed some simple data from the Northwind Traders sample data
  • In Episode 3 we learned how to change the appearance of the treeview
  • In Episode 4 we added Expand All and Collapse All buttons that interact with the treeview
  • And in Epsiode 5 we finally got the treeview to do something useful- we used it to select records to view and edit.

Here's this episode's treeview:

Download the finished database
In Episode 6 you'll see two things. The main focus of the episode is the use of images for the nodes in the treeview. As well, I'll demonstrate a different approach to the code that reads records from the tables and creates the nodes.

Unbound Form With Undo and Redo

Access is great at forms that are bound to tables in data. But sometimes there's value in creating an "unbound form". The data is stored in the controls on the form and your code saves it to the table (or tables) when the user clicks the save button. You might do this when the structure of your data is not ideal for your form- a survey database for example.

This post provides a working example of an unbound form complete with undo and redo buttons.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Access TreeView-ListView Basics from Database Journal

Here's a treeview article I haven't run across before: Access TreeView-ListView Basics from Database Journal walks the reader through creation of a form with a treeview and a listview.

It doesn't have a detailed explanation of how it works, but it does include a downloadable working example, and the zip file for the example includes the elusive help file that covers the treeview and listview controls- very handy! The code uses the "one pass" approach to loading the treeview- a single query is used that brings in all books, and whenever a new bookstore is encountered that node is added.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Connecting an InfoPath form to an Access database

Here's a reference from Microsoft on using InfoPath with Access. I haven't dug into InfoPath yet, but it looks like something that should be part of my toolbox.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Great Tutorials From Crystal on YouTube

Take a look at these video tutorials on YouTube. Crystal has started a great series of video tutorials. Crystal is an imprtant part of the UtterAccess community, she's a Microsoft Access MVP, and she's posted a great "Access Basics" reference here.