This class continues our look at programming in Visual Basic for
Applications in Microsoft Access (VBA, or Access VB). We will
continue working with adding partial payments to invoices that we
started on in Developer 7. We will begin by doing a little
housekeeping in our database. We'll add some features that
people have asked for since the last class. We'll start by putting a
button for our search form on the Main Menu. We'll add
a feature to open a customer record on the doubleclick event. We'll mark
the order Unpaid if the user deletes a payment. Lots of little things
like this will be covered in Lesson 1.

In Lesson 2 we're
going to begin a new project called the Test Taker
database. I've gotten lots of emails from my students over the past few
months asking if I could take some time to setup a new database, going
through table structure, relationships, referential integrity, and all
that. This new project is an opportunity to do that. So in this lesson
we're going to start building a database to give tests. You'll be able
to specify an unlimited number of classes, tests,
questions, and answers. You'll be able to track all of the responses
from students. You can have multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank
questions. You'll even be able to time the test, which we'll get to in a
later lesson. But today we will begin building this database. This
lesson is all about the database structure. We'll set up the tables,
relationships, and so on.

Next we will build
supporting forms for all of our test taker tables:
departments, classes, tests, and answers.

In Lesson 4 we're going to build a question form
with the answer subform right below it. This is
something that you couldn't do in very early versions of Access - have a
continuous form with a continuous subform inside of it.
I'll show you how. You can have multiple correct answers, even with
fill-in-the-blank type questions (you might want to allow them to type
in "2" or "two" for example).

Now that all of the
setup is complete, we can make a form to begin actually taking the test.
We'll select the student, department, class, and test, and have
cascading combo boxes which update based on your previous
selection, locking (disabling) the appropriate options. When the test is
started we'll assign an ID for the test session and use a little
SQL INSERT INTO statement to save that to the table. Then I'll
show you how to use DMAX to look it back up for storing the answers.

This is the 9th class in the Access Developer series. If you're
serious about building quality databases with Access, and you want to
learn how to automate your database with VBA Programming then don't miss out on
this course. Of
course, if you have any questions about whether or not this class is
for you, please contact me.

Complete Outline - Access
Developer Level
9

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