I need to edit forms and reports for a 5 year old application written
in MS Access 97. There is NO documentation of this application.
zero. It is an access front-end to an Oracle 8 application. true!

What I need to understand (and feel free to point me to online sites)
is the following:

1. In a report, how can I determine what query is generating the
report?
2. In a form, how can I determine what form element responds to what
table column?
3. How can I change drop-down items (Select and Combo-box elements)
to reflect database rows instead of a hard-coded list

again, this is all in Access 97. If there are any good "learning
access" sites with access97 articles out there, please let me know!

thanks!

Don Smith

An Access app front-end is quite a legitimate front end to an Oracle DB or
any large-scale database server. The Access GUI development environment for
forms and reports is excellent and possibly superior to many other
development platforms. Being a database app itself leads it to providing
database-centric forms, reports, query and API facilities. So long as the
developer is well versed and experienced in the techniques for obtaining
high performance (mostly never using linked tables and implementing most
data manipulation on the server with stored procedures) then the application
will perform well.
The questions you ask are the most basic, I suggest you find a professional
developer in your area. In the meantime all the facilities you refer to are
very similar in the Office 2000/XP versions and if you master them there you
will be capable of implementing them in the 97 environment.

Cheers and good luck.

"D" <bbcrock (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

ha! very funny. You did read the title of my post, right, that I
acknowledged up-front that these were easy "very dumb" questions.

There is no such thing as a legitimate fat client in 2004 and Access
97 is at a minimum 5 years and 3 versions out of date. Your post
really doesn't make a lot of sense here. I have to deploy this
product to 350 user machines- we're estimating about 20 hours of
billable staff time to get everyone on the new product. You can't
argue that C/S apps aren't a waste of time to deploy. Access 97
cannot easily send and receive xml data via soap. It cannot easily
display video. Do you want me to continue to list it's problems in
today's development environment?

If my questions are so easy then why couldn't you answer them? I
notice you went on the defensive very fast and you can see by my
original post that I was completely uncritical of Access 97 because I
required the help of some MS developers who do this daily.

My problem was not with the product, but with the so-called access
developer who did not accurately document their original application.
I looked for the meat of the documentation, past the screen shots, and
it wasn't there. I wouldn't be surprised if most Access professionals
weren't desparately looking for new contracts.

Meanwhile, I still have 1Z0-033 to finish.

Don

"malsnews" <malsnews_dontspamme_ (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

bbcrock (AT) hotmail (DOT) com (D) wrote in message news:<22e171df.0404210920.153c51ba (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>...
Hello Don,

Please excuse those "answer's" that don't really answer.

Anyway, in answer to your question:

1. Select the report you want to view it's source from, located
in the Reports container, and select the "Design" button. (Note:
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, just give information just in case.)

Anyway, with the report in design view, go to "View" and select "Properties"
to open up the properties window, if not done so already. Make sure the
"All" tab is selected and look for the property called "Record Source".

This will show you the source for the report, which will usually be
a query. Although it can be in SQL.

2. Repeat the same for forms in design view, but select the field you
want to see what the source field is from the query or table.

3. By "Hard Coded" list, do you mean the "Row Source Type" for the combo
box is a "Value List"? If so, change the row source type to Table/Query,
select the next line down, "Row Source", and a build button will show.
That's the one with the 3 dots on it. By selecting this, it will take you
into query design view. From there you can create a list from a source
table or another source query accordingly.

Hope this helps you out a little bit.

Regards,

Ray