Old problem with a new Q --->

[Max]

Here is a link to yesterday's thread
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...&p=1&tid=e0a2ec8b-0381-4c21-97cc-27f06c4569b5

My new question -- when I am setting up the new fields, can I set them so
that if a Y is entered in the Y/N field, that the next field, the
TransactionNo. cannot be ommitted?

(That is, if the person came through our WebForm, a Transaction Number needs
to be included. Because the Webmaster always sumbits it to us with the
information from the form -- sometimes the person filling out the form omits
a piece of data such as date of birth or phone number, but the Webmaster
never omits the transaction number when sending the data to us.)

OTOH, I don't want the Yes/No field to be required for all the records,
because most of the already existing records will not (have) come through the
webform and therefore will not have that entry. (OTOH, I can see myself
intuiting the need to go through the several thousand records adding a 'No'
for all the old ones, tsk. More work for the lowly admin. assist., tsk.)

Thanks to all again.

 

[Max]

Next Q -- upon adding the Yes/No field, it was displayed as a checkbox. Is
it supposed to appear that way (as opposed to seeing the actual word 'yes' or
'no'?)

 

[Vincent Johns]

Here is a link to yesterday's thread
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...&p=1&tid=e0a2ec8b-0381-4c21-97cc-27f06c4569b5

My new question -- when I am setting up the new fields, can I set them so
that if a Y is entered in the Y/N field, that the next field, the
TransactionNo. cannot be ommitted?

You can set a "record validation rule" (check Help for "Validate values
entered in a field, record, or control") to check for this. But this is
most helpful during a data-entry operation; otherwise, I think that
non-conforming records just end up being listed in a table of error
messages.

You might be ahead by importing all of them, then running a Query that
will list non-conforming records; this will allow you to correct the
mistakes even though they're already imported.

Incidentally, no matter how good your validation rules are, they cannot
guarantee or even detect if a record is correct. (If they could, you'd
not need to enter the data; you could just compute them.)

[...]

OTOH, I don't want the Yes/No field to be required for all the records,
because most of the already existing records will not (have) come through the
webform and therefore will not have that entry. (OTOH, I can see myself
intuiting the need to go through the several thousand records adding a 'No'
for all the old ones, tsk. More work for the lowly admin. assist., tsk.)

Are there three values for this Yes/No field? (I.e., "Yes", "No", or
"Omitted")

If you're using "Yes" to indicate "Submitted via Web", then it should be
pretty easy to run an Update Query to set that field in all the records
without a Web transaction number to "No". OTOH, if the only meaning for
"Yes" is that the record has a Web transaction number, then it's
redundant, and you should omit the entire field. Just test if the
transaction number field has a null value.

 

[Vincent Johns]

Next Q -- upon adding the Yes/No field, it was displayed as a checkbox. Is
it supposed to appear that way (as opposed to seeing the actual word 'yes' or
'no'?)

"Max" wrote:

Well, yes it is, but you can easily change it. In Table Design View,
select your Yes/No field, choose the Lookup tab, and change the Display
Control property from "Check Box" to "Text Box". Choose the General tab
and change the Format property to "Yes/No". (The actual value stored in
the table is likely a number with a value of -1 or 0, but you can set
the formatting to make it easier to read.)

-- Vincent Johns <[email protected]>
Please feel free to quote anything I say here.