Contact Form Design

[Anita]

I need strategic advice re: my form design.

I am building a Contact form where users can enter basic contact information
for an Entity.

To make it easier to account for the fact that people have multiple email
addresses, mobile devices, etc., I did NOT build a "flat" contact table with
fields like email1, email2, etc.

Instead, I built a Contact table with a ContactType field that specifies
whether the type of contact info is an address, email, cell phone, etc. and a
few "flat" fields where they actually enter the info itself.

With this structure, one Entity can have several Contact records (a separate
one for each mailing address, each different type of phone #, each email
address, each URL, etc.). The Entity and its many contacts are housed in an
Entity-Contact join table.

So here's my question.

To speed data entry, I don't want to force my users to have to select
"Address, Email, Cell Phone, Home Phone" etc. from a drop-down list before
they can type in the info. I want them to see a "regular" form with
placeholder labels for each type of information, and just be able to tab from
field to field, filling things in.

The only way I knew to do this was to create subforms for each address type
and put all these subforms on a master Data Entry form. (In other words, I
have an address subform, a fax subform, a cell phone subform, an email
subform, etc.) It works, but it's cumbersome and repetitive from a design and
coding standpoint.

Is there a smarter, faster way to accomplish this?

 

[Mr B]

Anita,

Although I do not normally include the Address and email addresses in my
selectable types list, it certainly be done. The way that I do it is to use
a list box that either uses a list produced by having its record source read
the values from a table that is designed just for that purpose or by having a
pre-defined value list.

In either case the user selects an option from the list and I then use the
after update event to display a text box to receive the data. If you are
going to have users enter different types of data you might also want to set
other properties of the text box like the format and/or the input mask.

When the user has entered the desired value, use the after update event of
the text box to add the new value to the appropriate table using DAO (you
could use ADO).

I normally also manage the value list in the list box and add an * in front
of any alue in the list that has a value entered for it. The value list is
then re-created to nodify the values in the list in the OnCurrent event of
the form and in the AfterUpdate event of the text box. Doing this allows
users to see at a glance which values in the listbox have entries for their
value without having to actually click on the value.

 

[Mr B]

Anita,

Sorry that i misunderstood what you were wanting.

After reviewing what you wrote, I realize how far off the mark I was.

I do not know of any other way to do what you are saying you want. I am
wondering just how you plan to show multiple entries for the various field
types.

 

[Peter Hibbs]

Anita,

You could probably do this using a Flex Grid control. Have a look at
my Flex Grid demo program at -

http://www.rogersaccesslibrary.com/OtherLibraries.asp#Hibbs,Peter S

for some examples, although the VBA code required to update the table
would be fairly complex.

Good luck.

Peter Hibbs.