Microsoft Access Team Blog : Graphic

Image Buttons

Zac Woodall — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:38:00 GMT

This is the first installment in a series of posts about Access 2007 originally made by one of our developers on the Access team on his own blog that I'm moving here for the broader audience to enjoy.

Up until this point, Access has supported command buttons with text or a picture, but never both at the same time. This has been a long standing request from users: the capability of showing both the caption and the picture. In Access 2007, you will notice a new property off of the command button called "Picture Caption Arrangement".

This property, which can be set to the following values:

No Picture Caption - This setting is the legacy behavior. If you have a caption specified, the button will show it. If you have a picture, only the picture will be shown;
General - The image will be shown to the left of the text (if you're in a left-to-right language, like English) or the right of the caption (if you're in a right-to-left language, like Hebrew);
Top/Bottom/Right/Left - The image will be shown in the specified arrangement: at the top, bottom, right or left of the caption (just pick one).

You will also notice that there is a new "Alignment" property. This property allows you to position the caption and picture within the command button to the following settings (note this property can be used whether you have just a picture, just a caption, or both):

General - This is the legacy behavior. The image and caption will be positioned the left of the text (if you're in a left-to-right language, like English) or the right of the caption (if you're in a right-to-left language, like Hebrew);
Left/Center/Right - The image and caption will be positioned to the left, centered or to the right (just pick one);
Distribute - This is equivalent to the "justified" setting in Microsoft Word. The image and caption will be spaced out to fill out the command button.

With these two new properties (which are of course also available through the OM), you will now be able to create some cool looking command buttons without any label trickery needed. Since you can now use JPEGs, PNGs and other newer image formats with Access 2007, you can create some really impressive buttons.

For example, in the snapshot below I created three buttons using Windows Vista backgrounds as the pictures. I changed the buttons' back style to transparent and played with the alignment and picture caption alignment settings:

A Tool for Building Custom AutoFormats

Erik Rucker — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 09:45:00 GMT

In the last post, I discussed the new AutoFormats in Access 2007. In this post, I'll describe more about how they work and provide a tool that allows you to create your own formats and customize the ribbon gallery of formats.

AutoFormat Storage

Access 2007 stores AutoFormat information in two different locations, depending on whether those formats have been customized or not. Un-customized formats are stored in tables in an Access 2007 format database that is installed with Office and is shared across all users who have no customized AutoFormats. The file is located at:

%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Office\Office12\ACCWIZ\ACWZUSR12.accdu

If a user has used the AutoFormat Wizard to add, edit, or delete an AutoFormat, then Access will create a copy of the AutoFormat file for that user. From that point on, all AutoFormat data for that user is stored in their personal database, which is at:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Access\ACWZUSR12.accdu

This is a similar scheme to the way AutoFormat information was stored in Access 2003, but the table schema has changed for Access 2007 formats, so it is not possible to reuse a version of the 2003 database to retain existing AutoFormat settings.

AutoFormat Functionality

The AutoFormat engine works by applying a single format per control type per section. This means, for example, that all the textboxes that appear in the details section of a report will get the same background color, font face, etc. as one another, but that these settings may all be different than the textboxes in the Header or another section. The AutoFormat database simply lists all of the property settings for each of the control types for each of the sections. There are four key tables in the database for these settings, along with other tables for things like supporting functionality, localization, and support for other features. They four key tables for formatting are:

tblStyles - this is a top-level style listing, normalized to style level data like the name of the style and the picture to display. Note that pictures are stored in the Access internal "Picture Data" format which can be set and retrieved using the PictureData property on images or form and report objects.

o tblSectionStyles – Each style has a list of section styles, being the appearance for each section (page header, detail, form footer, etc…). Formats included here are section background color and alternating background color.

§ tblControlStyles – For each section, there is a list of control styles, with 0 or 1 entries for each control type. Control styles have the bulk of the interesting formatting to do with text, like Bold, Italics, Underline, as well as shape appearance, like Border Color, Back Style, Special Effect, etc…

§ tblLayoutStyles – Formatting for layouts is also specified on a per-section basis. There can be 0 or 1 format entries per section for both Stacked and Tabular layouts. Layout formatting is mostly to do with gridlines. For example, all stacked layouts in the detail section can have a ‘Both’ grid style, while all Tabular Layouts have the ‘Vertical’ style.

AutoFormat Editing Tool

The format of these tables inside the database was never meant to be human readable, and can be pretty terse to browse. To make life easier for our own internal editing, we assembled a little tool (an Access database, of course) for viewing, adding, and editing AutoFormats for a given instance of the Acwzusr12.accdu file. If you would like to play around with AutoFormats a little bit, this tool will make that easier. Keep in mind that this is, something we just threw together to work with the rather complex AutoFormat data more easily. The code is pretty rough for a sample, without extensive comments or robust error handling, but it works well for reading and editing AutoFormat data, and what’s more, the tool contains updated AutoFormat data with a number of bug fixes we’ve made since Beta 2.

The tool is available here and is a 2m zip file, so will take a little while to download. This tool will also be part of the Access 2007 Developer Toolkit and will be both polished and contain the final AutoFormat settings at that point. The file simply contains an Access database, which you can save to your machine and open. You'll need to either save the file to a trusted location on your machine or manually enable VBA for the file to work.

Opening the tool brings up the following dialog:

(Click image to enlarge)

Clicking the first link "Step 1: Add / Edit AutoFormats" brings up a large dialog with a list of all of the formats and each of the settings for each of those formats:

(Click image to enlarge)

This is just a standard Access form, so you can filter or sort it as necessary. There is a separate record for the both the Form and Report settings for each format, and then each of the settings for each control and section is laid out below. The AutoFormat property called "Gallery Index" at the top determines where this format goes in the AutoFormat Gallery shown in the last post. This doesn't update the picture in the ribbon (to do that you need to update the ribbon XML file, which we'll cover later) but this is an easy way to get your format on the ribbon.

After you have updated the styles as you like, including adding or deleting any additional styles, you'll need to regenerate the AutoFormat tables. The first setup is to click the compile button, which runs a series of queries and repopulates all of the AutoFormat tables:

You can optionally then preview the styles, with some built-in UI. This is less of a visual preview and a set of reports to allow you to verify all the settings:

(Click image to enlarge)

There is a report that verifies that there are no missing styles, which you can access by clicking the Verify button:

At this point, the AutoFormat database has been rebuilt, and you simply need to publish it to the correct location on your machine. You can do this from the initial dialog. First you click the Browse hyperlink to set the file's location (this should be defaulted for you, and all you have to do is click OK). Then click Publish and you're done.

(Click image to enlarge)

Next Time

The next big post will be about using the new Data Collection feature to add or update data through emailed forms. Those forms can either be plain HTML that work on practically any email client or InfoPath forms that provide a great user experience for Office 2007 users.

Updated AutoFormats and New UI

Erik Rucker — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:58:00 GMT

Access 2007 has significantly updated the AutoFormats included in the box, and we'll provide a tool that can help create your own formats or customize the existing ones. This provides a fast way to generate a good (and modern) looking set of formatting across all your applications. Access, along with the other Office applications, has supported AutoFormat for some time, but the formats themselves are looking a little stale. Access 2007 addresses that. In this post, I'll cover the built-in AutoFormats and how to customize them with the UI. In the next post I'll describe the tool and how to use it to built your own formats and customize the gallery below.

AutoFormat Tools

The ribbon makes it much easier to surface controls for things like AutoFormats. Where before we'd have to throw a dialog to show the formats, in Access 2007 we can simply show a "gallery":

The gallery control in the ribbon shows 4 formats in a row at 1280*1024, and provides controls for scrolling through the other rows of formats. In addition, there's a "More" button that expands the gallery into an in-place pop-up that shows all the formats present and is both scrollable and resize-able to accommodate custom formats.:

The Built-in Formats

The default format is the "Office 2007" format and is the one you get if you use the Quick Create tools to build a new form. In the examples, I'm showing a simple quick-created form. Note that the form is in Layout View, so the dotted line and yellow highlighting around the ID field below won't appear at runtime. The example below is the default quick-created form. Below that is each of the other built-in AutoFormats in name order. A couple of the formats have interesting stuff that is right-aligned, so I've linked an expanded version as well. Finally,

Default:

Access 2003:

Apex:

Aspect:

Civic:

Concourse:

Currency:

Deluxe:

Equity:

Flow:

Foundry:

Median:

Metro:

None:

Northwind:

Office:

Opulent:

Oriel:

(Click image to enlarge)

Origin:

Solstice:

(Click image to enlarge)

Technic:

Trek:

Urban:

Verve:

(Click image to enlarge)

Windows Vista:

Customizing AutoFormats Through UI

Access 12 provide a similar AutoFormat wizard to that in 2003 that lets users customize the look of the formats or push changes back to them. The wizard is launched from the bottom of the gallery and provide both a list of the formats with preview, and some customization controls.

Clicking the Options button expands the dialog to allow control over which parts of the form or report get formatted:

Clicking Customize presents another dialog that allows the user to save changes back up to the format:

You can choose to either save the changes to a new AutoFormat or update the existing one (if it isn't one of the built-in formats). If you create a new format, it will be available from the AutoFormat wizard dialog, but not from the collection on the ribbon. However, we have created a tool that will let you update the contents of the gallery to present your own formats. I'll cover that tool and how to build your own formats in the next post.

Better Looking Forms & Reports, Faster

Erik Rucker — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:53:00 GMT

Building modern looking data forms & reports in Access 2003 can be difficult. Doing the heavy lifting is easy - there are great tools for building the data-bound portions of the form - but making the interface look great can be a challenge and can require some creative hacks. UtterAccess even has a popular board devoted to helping people build better looking interfaces. In Access 12, we've built a number of features that will help people build great looking apps with far less code, time and effort.

Better Image Support

We did work to improve native support for image formats. In the past, you could add pictures but there were some serious limitations. First, when the picture was added it was converted from its native format to a device independent bitmap (dib). This resulted in significant bloat if the image stored data in a compressed file format such as gif and jpg. Even worse in many cases, when the image was converted transparency was lost.

Access 2007 now supports BMP, GIF, JPEG, Exif, PNG, TIFF and DiB without bloating the database size. Images with transparency work great. You can see how we're using transparency below - the buttons are all transparent, as is the image in the title bar.

To ensure that database are backwards compatible, we created a new database property called “Preserve image format.” This property controls if the image is converted to a dib or stored in its native format. ACCDB databases default to storing images in their native format while MDB and ADP database Access 2007 will continue to convert images to DiBs so that the image is available when the form is used by older versions of Access. In a nutshell—if you want your image to be displayed in previous versions of Access make sure preserve image format is set to false. I recommend turning off the property if your app is deployed as a runtime or in an Access 2007 only environment.

Another painful limitation of former versions was displaying images on a form or report that were stored in the file system. The Northwind employees form had 135 lines of code to make this work. Now the image control can be bound to a UNC path including jpg and png files.

AutoFormats

AutoFormats are a great way to create a consistent look across an application, but the existing themes were looking pretty dated. In Access 12, there are 25 new themes that you can choose from that will add that final polished look to your application. The Quick Format gallery gives a small preview of the font and color schemes:

Other New Look Improvements

In Access 11 the SizeMode property provides enums for Clip, Stretch, and Zoom. These properties do not allow us to create really small horizontal or vertical images that tile across the header. The 2003 behavior was to stretch the image across the entire form or report. In many cases the right effect is to stretch horizontally. There are now two new enums: Stretch Horizontal and Stretch Vertical. This makes it possible to stretch an image across the header of the form when it is the Picture property on the background of a form or report.

We also did work to make the grid control more modern and remove the Windows 95 3-D look. Internally, we draw the grid colors from the exact same color palette as Excel.

A few weeks Deano asked about tab controls:

“Also will tab controls blend correctly when you change the colours? I use Access 2000 and there's a section in the top-right of the tab control that does not match the changed form colour.”

I’m pleased to say that the color now matches the form color. Here is a screen shot from WinXP:

We made a one change to buttons that I think folks will find useful. There is a new enum for backstyle called Transparent and a new property called HandOnHover. Using those two properties and you can create buttons that look like hyperlinks. BTW – have you seen the Vista buttons? I think they look great in our shell.

Cyrus asked about pixel drawing problems on disabled images. This problem has been fixed in builds after beta 2 if preserve image format = false. We remove all the color from the image.

There is still a some button work we want to consider in the next version. Cyrus—we hear you on button background colors and images and text. Another thing we wanted to do this version but didn’t get to was color properties for different mouse over states.

New Attachment Data Type

If you want to store images directly in the database—the attachment data-type and control works great. In the past users would use the OLE Object data type. Because of how OLE worked there were bloat issues as it had to store a preview of the file along with the OLE data. Attachments are a new complex data-type that stores multiple attachments to a record in a binary field in a hidden table. We compress the file when it is added if it isn’t already a compressed file type. Here is the dialog to manage attachments:

When the image has focus there is a helpful floating toolbar that allows you to navigate through records and launch the dialog.

There are three display as enums: Paperclip, Image, and Icon. The icon will always show up as a paper clip in datasheet view.

Attachments are exposed in QBE similar to other complex data forms. Users can query for the collection or the expanded version returning a row for each attachment. Let me walk through an example with a simple issues database with one record that has 4 attachments. The query designer exposes three columns that are stored in the hidden complex data table: FileData, FileName, and FileType. Double clicking on the root Attachment node will add the attachment collection to the grid below.

This generates the following SQL:

SELECT Issues.Title, Issues.Attachments

FROM Issues;

The query returns the collection of Attachments.

If you add the Attachment.FileName to the query you get the expanded results set. Here is the SQL:

SELECT Issues.Title, Issues.Attachments.FileName

FROM Issues;

The datasheet now returns the expanded results:

The collection is exposed through DAO so that you can modify and update it. Here is a short code sample:

Private Sub cmdAddImage_Click()

Dim rsEmployees As DAO.Recordset2

Dim rsPictures As DAO.Recordset2

Set db = CurrentDb

' Get the parent recordset

Set rsEmployees = Me.Recordset

'Put the parent record into edit mode

rsEmployees.Edit

'Get the attachment recordset

Set rsPictures = rsEmployees.Fields("AttachmentCell").Value

'Set first attachment to loaded picture

rsPictures.Edit

rsPictures.Fields("FileData").LoadFromFile ("C:\FileName.jpg")

rsPictures.Update

MsgBox "Picture added"

' Update the parent record

rsEmployees.Update

End Sub

The attachment data-type is available in ACCDB files and link tables to WSS lists. It is not available for MDB and ADP databases. We didn’t expand the 2GB limit for Access databases. If you think you will have lots of data in your app break out the attachment column into its own database and use a link table to join it with the table.

Next Time

In the next big post, I'll look at Filtering and Grouping. In the meantime, I'll have a smaller post about searching in the navigation pane.