Thread: Church Database
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Old March 1st, 2010, 04:08 PM posted to microsoft.public.access.tablesdbdesign
Fred
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Default Church Database

To: Everyone

Lots of good thoughts & ideas.

I write and run db's for a lot of organizations. And the one thing that I
learned is that the design needs to be driven by the mission for your DB, and
the particulars of the mission and the organization.

There is probably ony one sentence that I'd disagree with, and that is when
Dennis said that listing a seperate family name would be a duplication of
data and thus violation of normalization. The people's names are, of course
an entity. But the family name is also an entity, which is the name that
they wish their family to be called by. Although last names would often be
duplicated, "often" doesn't meet the standard for being able to derive one
from the other.

Lastly, regarding the level of user that the DB is designed for, I do a lot
of databases designs for people who are slightly smart and who have received
about 1 hour of Access training. I teach them what tables, linked tables,
queries, form and reports are, and what they do. Also how to set criteria
in a query design grid. Of this approach is good for some situations and
terrible for others. It does cut development time down to about 1/4. Which
is good for me because I'm really weak on a lot of developer stuff (coding
etc.) :-)






"Dennis" wrote:

Kathy,

Your comment: I am curious to hear from the experts though... is a query
the thing to use here, or is there some VBA code that would make the job
easier? For years I was the only person to use the database so I just
changed the query by hand each time. It would not be a pretty sight in the
office though if anything should ever happen to me.

My Response: I’m not a expert by any means, but from all my questions in
this forum and from what I’ve read, queries or SQL statements in the Form’s
Source property is the way to go.


Your comment: I know there's a way to make a form for the user to choose
which group they'd like to see a report/list/mailing labels for and that is
one of the things I'll be adding to the design this time around. That will
require some coding, but the underlying query will remain the same.

My Response: I’ve already done this, if you want I could post the code
here. There are a couple of tricks. In the On Open event of the report, you
have it open a form by using the command

strDocName = "frmMemberInfo"
DoCmd.OpenForm strDocName, , , , ,acDialog

You want to have the popup window as a dialog box, this makes it a “modal”
(sp?) window. When user had entered all of the desired parameters and hit
the Print / Process report button, don’t close the pop-up window – instead
hide the pop-up window by:

Me.Visible = False

The window will no longer be visible, but you still have access to all of
the data. From what I’ve read and from what people on the forum suggest,
don’t return the values from the pop-up via global variables, instead you can
access the variables in the pop-up window from within the calling VBA code by:

mylocalvariable = Forms!formname!controlname

mylocalvar = forms!frmMemberInfo!cboCustNo would return the value of the
control cboCustNo on the frmMemberInfo form.


Fred said he had to address the issue of couple that did not take the other
person’s name – such as Mark Jones and Mary Smith. Do you have that issue,
and if so how are you address it?

Why do you have a Family Last Name on the Family table?


Also, on the data entry form, do you provide a way to search for a family
name (I assuming that is what the Family Last Name is form, but want to make
sure).

Also, can you type in a name and find to which family it is associated?

Also, I’m read through you description again and did not see where you
describe you data entry screen(s). Would you be so kind doing that? I’m
having trouble visualizing the organization of the data entry form?



Thanks

Dennis