Query Wizard for Users

[scott]

I would love to see some examples of wizards that people have created that
allow users to create queries of databases. Please let me know if you are
aware of some good wizards that exist online or have templates that are
available for me to look at.

 

[Duane Hookom]

For some reason, I really like the query by form applet available at
http://www.rogersaccesslibrary.com/OtherLibraries.asp#Hookom,Duane. I put it
in almost every mdb that I create.

 

[scott]

Very impressive! This approach gives me some good ideas about how to do what
I need, but I'm not sure I could use it for my purposes. It's quite a bit
more complex than what I would need. I also don't see where the user can
select the "And" or "Or" option. It looks to me that your application uses
"And" only in its query construction. Is that true?

The selections that users in my database will need to do are often
multiselect on one field (ususally it will be "Or", but I could see where
they may want to use "And") and an "And" selection on another field (though I
could see where they may select "Or"). It is a skill and region database of
people where the user wants to find someone who is skilled in a couple areas
and has experience working in one or more regions. So they would ask for a
list of people who are skilled in 2 areas or more (to get a larger list they
would ask for people who are skilled in two or more related areas) and they
worked in one or more regions.

Are you aware of any templates that come close to doing the selections this
way? Or am I missing something about your template that allows the user to
select in this manner?

 

[Duane Hookom]

The applet is fairly easy to implement since you only need to import some
objects and create master datasource queries with names beginning with "<".

You are correct regarding supporting only "And" and not "Or". This has
worked for 90% of my users. Making them choose And or Or would cause more
issues.

You could modify the applet to keep lists of values that could serve as a
multi-select. This would require another table related to the "fields" table
that would store the "selected" values. I could see selecting "multiple
values" from the operator dropdown and a dialog form would open to allow
selection of one or more values.

I generally create a form for all types of criteria selections including
multi-select list boxes etc. This is used only for published reports but I
suppose could be used for creating standard queries much like the QBF applet.

 

[scott]

OK. Thanks. This has been a big help. I saw your Multiple Value dropdown
sample on the same site you reference and I can see using that here or in
several other applications I use.