Avoiding empty continuous form

[rsosabusiness]

Hi everyone!
Our office uses a database to record donations for different
charitable purposes. From time to time it is necessary to find
donations to make corrections and also once in a while to delete them
because of returned checks. We filter the donations to be displayed by
the donor's name selected from a combo box. Occasionally, there is
only one donation for the selected donor and it is to deleted. After
the deletion the result is a blank form, which tends to confuse the
user. In such cases, is there a way to then filter by the next donor
in the table?
Cordially,
Robert

 

[Wayne-I-M]

Hi

I wouldn't delete the payment - sometimes a payment is re-presented to a
bank and it is then paid. Or it may be the the donor re-pays the amount at a
later date, in which case you could issue a second reciept for the same
donation. It may be an idea (up to you) to add a field to show "paid". Or
better still amend the Date of Donation field to show the acutal date the
"cash" (not the donation) was recieved.

If the cash is not recieved for any reason you would then have a record of
this and you would be able to see if a particular donor has had many return
cheques / checks.

 

[BruceM]

If you are to conceal the fact that there are no donations for a particular
person, how would you go about adding a donation for a new donor? You could
hide the Donations subform (it sounds as if you are using a form/subform
setup) if there are no donation records, then unhide it if a donation record
is to be added, or something like that, but I wonder if that would be any
clearer to the users, particularly if the subform is continuous.

 

[rsosabusiness]

Hi, Wayne & Bruce
The donations are not knowledged until the end of the year because
almost all donors give several times a year, so issuing receipts is
not a big factor.
When a check is not paid for any reason, it is returned to us by the
bank. If the donor wants us to resubmit it for payment, it goes into a
new deposit. Consequently, if we do not delete the original one, the
donor would be credited twice. So deleting the donation does not seem
unreasonable to us. So the question of an empty form (is not a
subform) still lingers in my mind. Any ideas?
Cordially,
Robert

 

[BruceM]

If the dontations do not appear in a subform, does that mean donations are
part of a donor's record along with name, address, etc.? If so, that is not
an effective design, but it also leads to the question of what record
exactly you wish to delete. Are you really talking about deleting a record,
or are you deleting data in a field?

 

[rsosabusiness]

Hi, Bruce!
Thanks for staying with this rather trivial issue. Let's step back a
little.
There is no subform involved. And we are deleting a record. And
donations and names and addresses are matched at the time the donation
statements are printed. Now, focusing on the blank form. When the user
receives notification of a returned check he clicks on the button that
invokes this form. In the form, he selects the donor from a combo
list. This causes the form to be filtered by the selected donor, and
only the donations from that donor appear on the form. He selects the
donation that matches the returned check and deletes it. If it so
happens that the donor had only one donation, deleting it results in a
form that shows no records. That, to me, looks strange. So if there is
some property somewhere that indicates that no records are showing,
then I could filter by the first letter of the donor's last name, or
something like that and avoid the blank stare.

 

[BruceM]

Sorry, I can't come up with anything. There may be a way to use the Delete
event to do something or other, but I can't get it to remove the filter or
perform any other meaningful action. Maybe the After Update event could
come into play, but again I don't see how.
It sounds as if you are entering complete donor information with each
donation, which is more suited to a spreadsheet than a database. In your
situation each donor may make many donations. In a relational database this
means there is a donor table where each donor's information is stored once,
and a related donations table for the individual donations. Perhaps I
misunderstand the situation, but since you are not using a subform I don't
see how else to interpret it.
What do you do if a donor's name changes?