Actually, what I am looking for is a place to store the "field to display"
within the table structure. This information would be made available to an
component in vb.net we are creating to display a virtual form, adjusting
itself to the structure of the underlying table.
The component parses the structure of the Acesss table and creates the
virtual form which doesn't store any data within the acesss table, but
rather stores the data in an identical table within an mssqlserver.
The purpose of using the acesss structure is that access table structures
contains all the necessary values to create lookups and such and this method
allows us to also use the component to update access tables if needed. In
other words we are using an access db to distribute along with our
application that stores nothing but the table structure.
The component maps the access table structure, gleans all the properties,
including lookup information for foreign tables and this method allow for
easy changes to the way data is displayed mealy by adjusting the table
structure as needed.
My alternatives would be to put this information in an external table
structure, which is at best messy, or worse imbed within the application,
resulting in needing a new application if there is a change. I am quite
aware that Microsoft has thousands of examples of doing this by creating
application with all sorts of lookup information included as part of code.
I just happend to believe that this is just plain bad programming
I also believe that the table structure should contain all of the necessary
information to display, and glean data entry from the user other tables and
other database. MS Sqlserver is just plain deficient in table structure
features. Access is better.
An access table has a field in the lookup structure called boundcol, what I
was hoping for is a DisplayCol field. But I don't see one.
The rewards for creating our virtual form component, which we have already
created is that you can with one form display and manage thousands of tables
..
wj
