reservedbcreater said:
what the heck is a subform and continuous form??
how do i create them???
what is the purpose/advantages of both???
A subform is a form that is displayed in a window on another form,
usually (but not always) because the subform shows detail records that
are related to the current record on the containing or "parent" form.
This is accomplished by way of a special control on the parent form --
the subform control -- which identifies the form object to be displayed
in the subform window, and optionally identifies the fields that are
related on the two forms.
A continuous form is one that shows multiple records at a time (but yet
is not a datasheet). That is to be contrasted with a form that shows
only a single record. These features are established by the form's
Default View property, which can have values "Single Form", "Continuous
Forms", or "Datasheet". Depending on your version of Access there may
also be a few other view options. A continuous form will generally have
a vertical scroll bar allowing the user to scroll through all the
records on the form, if they don't all fit in the space provided by the
subform control.
can i transfer over my poorly desgined DB with 17 tables, and a form
for each table to subforms or continuous forms with simple copy and
paste actions and some changes in the code?
I can't say, since I haven't seen your database. You can take an
existing form and place it onto another form as a subform by simply
dragging it from the database window and dropping it onto the intended
parent form, if the parent form is open in design view. Whether the
subform control that Access builds in that circumstance is configured to
properly represent the relationship between the forms depends largely on
whether you have defined the relationship between their recordsource
tables in the Relationships Window.
Generally, no code is required to get subforms to act the way they
should, as that is a built-in feature of Access. However, it's
important to note that a subform on an open parent form is not
officially "open" as far as Access is concerned -- it's not a member of
the Forms collection, so any references to it in your code that are
framed as "Forms!FormName" won't work. References to subform must be
made by way of the parent form and the subform control on the parent
form.