Microsoft Access Team Blog : Reference

Using Hyperlinks in Access: Display As Hyperlink and Is Hyperlink

Steven Greenberg — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:47:10 GMT

Those of you transitioning to Access 2007 from earlier versions of the product may notice the addition of a new property on the TextBox and ComboBox controls: Display As Hyperlink. You may wonder how this new property interacts with the existing Is Hyperlink property. I asked that question myself and found that the available documentation left some of my questions unanswered. So I’m writing this blog post to hopefully fill that void.

First of all, if you’re happy with pre-Access 2007 behavior, just keep Display As Hyperlink set to its default value, “If Hyperlink”.

The key point about Display As Hyperlink is this: You’ll want to change Display As Hyperlink to “Always” if you want a combo box or text box to appear like a hyperlink even though it’s actually tied to a text field not a hyperlink field. By doing this, you can leverage your users’ familiarity with the hyperlink look and feel and encourage them to click on a field in order to trigger some action.
You’ll see examples of this technique throughout the Access 2007 templates. For instance, take a look at the ID field in the Contact List form in the Contacts template. Clicking on the ID field drills through to the Contact Details form for the specified row.

Setting Display As Hyperlink causes the text in the ComboBox or TextBox to be colored blue and underlined. (Note that the hyperlink color doesn’t have to be blue. It can be customized by clicking the Office button, going to the Advanced tab and clicking Web Options.) Additionally, when hovering over the control, the cursor turns from a pointer into a Hyperlink Hand.

In the past, folks might have accomplished these goals by just setting Is Hyperlink to “Yes”. But there are three subtle problems with this approach. One problem is that setting Is Hyperlink to “Yes” does not make the control’s OnClick event keyboard-accessible. But setting Display As Hyperlink to “Always” means that when the user tabs to the control and hits the Enter key, any macros tied to an OnClick event will be run.

The second problem with setting Is Hyperlink to “Yes” is that it causes the control to be editable as if it’s a hyperlink. So you can right click on the control and select “Edit Hyperlink”. This doesn’t make sense when the field is not actually the hyperlink data type, and can lead to undesirable results.

The third problem with setting Is Hyperlink to “Yes” is that it causes the text of the control to be parsed as if its datatype is "hyperlink". The hyperlink datatype in Access makes it possible for a single field to store and edit the display text, address, sub-address and tooltip for a hyperlink.This is done by storing the four values together in a single line of text with the values separated by hash signs. Specifically, the syntax is: DisplayText#Address#SubAddress#Tooltip. Putting aside the tooltip and sub address for the sake of example, when you set a hyperlink field to Microsoft’s web site, that value is stored in the database as “Microsoft’s Website#http://www.microsoft.com##”.

So if you were unfortunate enough to set Is Hyperlink to “Yes” on a field with values that have # signs in them, no text after the # sign would get displayed to the user. The user might enter “200 Main Street, Apartment # 23”. But when they looked back at the form, they would only see “200 Main Street Apartment”. Setting Display As Hyperlink to “Always” does not cause the text of the field to be interpreted as an encoded hyperlink.

One final note: There’s an additional third option for Display As Hyperlink: “Screen Only”. This is a great option to use when building the kinds of interactive reports which are now possible with Access 2007. You want the field to show up as a hyperlink on the screen, but when the report is printed out, there’s no need to show the text as blue and underlined.
I hope this can help you understand a new property in Access 2007 that can be a bit confusing at first sight.

Steven

Office Online Community Submitted Database Templates

Zac Woodall — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:43:53 GMT

Community submitted templates are now live on Office Online!! "Er?" You say, "what has this to do with me?" I'm so glad you asked!!

For the first time ever, there is now a Microsoft hosted service through which you can publish and share database applications with the community at large. OfficeOnline is the template service that Microsoft uses to host its own document templates, and it is extremely popular, with 2.8 million Access 2007 template downloads for since Jan of 07. For 2007 it has been opened up for publication by anyone who has access to the web. Initially this support was just for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but as of mid-December you can now publish and share your own Access apps and samples through this service. Your templates get integrated directly into the system so users searching the site for a specific type of template will find your .accdt files right alongside the ones Microsoft has published. Community submitted templates are marked with a little red pawn, so users can distinguish them from Microsoft supplied templates, and as with the ones Microsoft publishes, each community template has a rating of 1-5 stars set by the community, and a count of downloads. Here's an example:

NOTE: In order to be able to browse templates submitted by the community, you must choose moderate or unfiltered for the "Community Filter" at the left hand side of the page.

Publishing

Now, I would love to be able to tell you that you can publish any application created with any version of Access to the site. For the first iteration this isn't going to be the case. For this version of the service, we've made an explicit decision to limit the functionality which can be uploaded in a template to features which don't automatically act on the user's behalf to edit or upload data, or to invoke functionality that would otherwise affect things outside the database. We're intentionally beginning with a very tight set of restrictions, with the intention of testing the system out and understanding the space better before we turn on more advanced functionality.

Here are the requirements for a template published to OfficeOnline:

Because we can open and scan the contents of them in code without booting Access on the server, the only template format we support is 2007's new .accdt format.
Templates which use features that require the database to be enabled, including VBA, action queries, and macro actions which change data without prompting the user first will be rejected by the publication engine.
Templates cannot have linked tables (if you think you'd need this in a template, I'd love too hear your scenario)

"What?" you say, "But I put VBA in everything!" Yes. I know you do. We want to enable this scenario eventually, but not for this round. There are a ton of really interesting things you can build and share on the template service which do not use code. You still have the full power of Access tables, queries, and reports, and you can build user-interface logic in forms using Access 2007's new embedded macro technology. Plus are a slew of interesting ways to slice data through the use of Queries and Expressions, and you can definitely build and share those. Here are some ideas of things which might be interesting to publish as templates:

Pre-populated data (e.g. US zipcode table)
Pre-designed Forms (e.g. a mahogany form background with polished wood buttons)
Pre-formatted reports (e.g. report for Seiko Smart Label Printer 420)
Complex many-table union query that returns the results of some really interesting thing
A scaled down demo of your for-sale solution with a link back to your own website for the full version

You can even build a fully functional data tracking application should you so choose. As an example, check out the cool little wedding tracking application built to help couples prepare for the big day by built by Abigail Short, one of the developers on the Access team (thank you Abigail!).

Tools

There are two key tools that everyone creating Access templates will want to take advantage of.

The Access 2007 Developer Extensions - After you've installed it, you will have a Developer -> Save as Template menu item in the Office button. This is by far the easiest way to create a template file.
The Access dev team's own Scott Gardner has put together a command line tool that you can run against your .accdt to pre-verify that it meets the rules imposed by OfficeOnline (thank you Scott!). Just run this tool from cmd.exe, passing in the location of your .accdt file and it will give you the OK, or a list of issues that will cause OfficeOnline to reject it. The tool requires that .Net 3.0 be installed on your system.

Submitting

Here's what you need to do to get your template submitted to Office Online:

Choose "Submit a Template" from the links on the left hand side of the Office Online template page (this can be a little hard to pick out of all the other links, see the picture to the right for a pointer).
Follow the submission steps
72 hrs. or so later your template should be live

Reference

You can find some information about Access 2007 templates here:

If you're looking for a more complete reference, we've arranged a deal with with Rational Press for blog readers to have a 35% discount on their title "The Rational Guide to Microsoft® Office Access 2007 Templates" by yours truly. The book assumes that readers will have the need to create safe templates like the ones required to upload to Office Online, and I include a detailed explanation of how to create interesting codeless solutions.

New Ribbon Reference: RibbonX for Dummies

Zac Woodall — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 05:12:47 GMT

Those of you out there building custom Ribbon UI for Access/Office might be interested to know that the Dummies folks have recently released a guide for building Ribbon UI titled (as you might expect) "RibbonX for Dummies". The book is a general guide to building Ribbon XML, and it does include a section specifically on Access 2007.

Teaching users to fish--an online intro to queries

Clint Covington — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:27:00 GMT

Does this sound familiar? Smart Access user builds a cool database to help co-workers do their jobs more efficiently. Co-workers sing praises and advocate a raise for the smart Access hero. A few weeks later, end users ask hero to help create a couple queries and reports to answer more complex business questions. Hero has three choices:

Tell them to get lost and lose new-found hero status.
Write the query for end users and thus, assume new roll as team Access developer.
Teach end users how to fish.

I’m a big fan of teaching people to fish.

The end user assistance team has been hard at work improving the most commonly accessed help topics. They recently updated Introduction to queries with new content and the following five wildly popular demos for visual learners:

Look at a subset of the data in a table
Review data from more than one table simultaneously
Ask variations of a question by using parameters with a query
Make calculations based on your data
Look at summarized or aggregate data

Next time your co-workers want you to help them answer a business question with a query—send them a link to the help topic and teach them to fish. They will feel empowered with new-found technical chops.

AccessJunkie's updated 2007 content

Zac Woodall — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:28:00 GMT

Our very own Access Junkie, Jeff Conrad, has updated his 2007 Help links and FAQ. These are great resources for 2007 info. Jeff is an engineer on our test team who is very active in the newsgroups, and he's tried to capture answers to the questions that he sees asked most commonly by the community at large. Here are some pointers:

2007 Help Links: http://accessjunkie.com/helplinks2007.aspx
2007 FAQ: http://accessjunkie.com/faq2007.aspx

For those who are curious, Jeff is hosting this site on OfficeLive. If you're of a mind, you can create your own OfficeLive site for free, complete with a custom domain name like Jeff has.

Access 2003 --> Access 2007 UI Guide

Zac Woodall — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:38:00 GMT

The Access help team has just finished up our new interactive guide for users moving from 2003 to 2007. The guide is a flash based tutorial which allows you to select a command from the 2003 Access UI, and then see where it has moved to in the 2007 ribbon.

Using VBA code to open a file stored in the new Access 2007 Attachment field

James K. Rivera — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:30:00 GMT

Someone asked me about using the Attachment data type in Access 2007 for a specific task. They wanted to use it as a simple data type where it would only be used to hold 1 file per record, and they wanted to be able to open the file in an external application using a button on a form instead of using the Attachment control on a form. Given these constraints, I was created a simple VBA function for doing just that:

Public Function OpenFirstAttachmentAsTempFile(ByRef rstCurrent As DAO.Recordset, ByVal strFieldName As String) As String 

    Dim rstChild As DAO.Recordset2
    Dim fldAttach As DAO.Field2
    Dim strFilePath As String
    Dim strTempDir As String

    strTempDir = Environ("Temp") ' Get the Temp directory from the environment variable.
    If Right(strTempDir, 1) <> "\" Then strTempDir = strTempDir & "\" ' Make sure the path always ends with a backslash.
        Set rstChild = rstCurrent.Fields(strFieldName).Value ' the .Value for a complex field returns the underlying recordset.
        strFilePath = strTempDir & rstChild.Fields("FileName").Value ' Append the name of the first (and only) attached file to temp dir.
        If Dir(strFilePath) <> "" Then ' the file already exists--delete it first.
        VBA.SetAttr strFilePath, vbNormal ' remove any file attributes (e.g. read-only) that would block the kill command.
        VBA.Kill strFilePath ' delete the file.
    End If

    Set fldAttach = rstChild.Fields("FileData") ' The binary data of the file.
    fldAttach.SaveToFile strFilePath
    rstChild.Close ' cleanup
    VBA.Shell "Explorer.exe " & Chr(34) & strFilePath & Chr(34), vbNormalFocus ' Use Windows Explorer to launch  the file.

End Function 'OpenFirstAttachmentAsTempFile

Then I wrote this function just to test it in a database that has a Table1 with an Attachment field named "Files" in which I had already placed a file:

Public Function TestOpenFirstAttachmentAsTempFile()
    Dim dbs As DAO.Database
    Dim rst As DAO.Recordset
    
    Const strTable = "Table1"
    Const strField = "Files" ' Attachment field in Table1

    Set dbs = CurrentDb
    Set rst = dbs.OpenRecordset(strTable)
    'rst.MoveNext ' Uncomment this line to go to the 2nd row in the Table.
    OpenFirstAttachmentAsTempFile rst, strField
    rst.Close
End Function

By using the VBA.Shell command with Explorer.exe, the file will be opened just as if you double clicked it from Windows Explorer!

See my previous blog post about attachments for more information about accessing attachments from DAO.

Access 2007 Reports Demo

Zac Woodall — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:20:00 GMT

I can't resist doing a quick post to let you all know about the new report demo that just got published to OfficeOnline. This is a quick little video, just a few minutes long, which gives a great overview of some of our new reporting features in 2007. Big thanks to my engineers, Steve Lesser, Abigail Short, and Nishant Kumar for helping me to make these features a reality!

Creating item templates for Ribbon customizations to use in Visual Studio

robcooper — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 03:47:00 GMT

Despite my passion for all things related to code, I've always had a soft spot for UI that is exciting both in its "coolness" factor and visual appeal. Along those lines, one of my favorite new features in Access 2007 is Ribbon Extensibility. Writing the XML for a customization can be a bit of a bear, so here is a tip for making this easier.

Before getting started with creating your own customizations, there are a few things you should have:

customUI.xsd schema for Ribbon extensibility
Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express

With Visual Studio or one of the Express editions installed, you can create new file item templates that have portions of the XML of a customization already written. This involves creating the relevant XML and saving it to a particular directory, then modifying a file used by Visual Studio to tell it about the new file that you're adding.

For example, let's say that you wanted to create a new Ribbon customization that started with a blank Ribbon with a single tab with a single group. The XML for the customization might look something like:

<customUI xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui">
    <ribbon startFromScratch="true">
        <tabs>
            <tab id="tab1">
                <group id="group1">

                </group>
            </tab>
        </tabs>
    </ribbon>
</customUI>

Create a new XML file that uses this customization and save it as RibbonTabAndGroup.xml in the following location: %PROGRAMFILES%Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\NewFileItems. Change the path to Visual Studio/Visual Web Developer Express if needed.

Next, modify the NewFileItems.vsdir file in the NewFileItems directory to add the new item. For details about this file, check out this article in MSDN. Add the following record to the .vsdir file as the last line of the file.

RibbonTabAndGroup.xml| |RibbonX - Tab and Group|80|Ribbon customization for a blank Ribbon with one tab and one group|#14207|0|0|RibbonXTabGroup.xml

After you add the record to the file, close and re-open Visual Studio. Click the File menu, then choose New and choose File... You should now see the new item in the New File dialog as shown here.

Set SharePoint List Template for Access Table

Zac Woodall — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:32:00 GMT

There was an interesting question in one of the other posts that I thought I'd answer here to reach the broader audience:

Doug said:

If I export Northwind 2007 to WSS 3.0, the tables, like Customer, that contain 'Contact' type information get exported to an WSS 'Contact' content type. Very cool! Now you can view them in Outlook as a contact list.

However, if I craft a table from hand with the exact same name, and the exact same fields, and export it, it is exported as a 'Custom' content type and I get no Outlook love.

What magic is done in Northwind to make this happen? I really want to be able to do the same thing.

Great Question Doug!

The answer is that Access keeps around a jet property named WSSTemplateID which enables us to correlate which tables have a built-in SharePoint list template equivalent. Here's a list of IDs for the different types we support out of the box:

Contacts: 105
Events:106
Tasks: 107
Issues: 1100

Here's a line of code that will set the WSS ID for contacts onto a table, so that when you try to publish it, you'll get the Contacts template in SharePoint. Just replace Table1 with your table name, and you should be good!

CurrentDb.TableDefs("Table1").Properties.Append CurrentDb.CreateProperty("WSSTemplateID", dbInteger, "105", False)

Thanks for the awesome question!

New Access 2007 Articles on Office Online

Zac Woodall — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:33:00 GMT

Thanks to Jeff Conrad on the Access test team for this:

Office Online now has published four articles with material pulled from the Microsoft Office Access 2007 Inside Out book. This enormous book, published by Microsoft Press, is co-authored by Access MVP John L. Viescas and recent Microsoft hire Jeff Conrad. You can find these new articles at the following links:

Exploring a desktop Access 2007 database:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326851033.aspx

Create an Access 2007 database using templates:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326861033.aspx

Build forms in Access 2007 using design tools:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326841033.aspx

Automate applications with macros in Access 2007:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326831033.aspx

Formatting numbers into hexadecimal

robcooper — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 03:17:00 GMT

Even though class modules in VBA are not as powerful as their brethren in C++, C#, or VB.NET, I'm still a fan. Some time ago, I wrote an application which contained a class called ISearch and then subclasses which implemented this class using the Implements keyword. For debugging, I thought it would be cool to print the address of the ISearch implementation object using the ObjPtr function. The ObjPtr function returns a Long that represents the memory address of an object variable. These numbers were a bit long for my liking, so to make them easier to read and understand, I wrote this function called FormatHex. This function wraps the Hex function in VBA but applies some formatting to it.

' -------------------------------------------------------------------------
' Function : FormatHex
' Purpose  : Formats a number in hexadecimal format
' Arguments: lngValue - numeric value to format
'          : nLength  - returned length of the string
'          : strPrefix - hex prefix for the number - defaults to 0x
' -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Function FormatHex(lngValue As Long, _
    Optional nLength As Byte = 8, _
    Optional strPrefix As String = "0x") As String

    FormatHex = Trim(strPrefix & Replace(Format(Hex(lngValue), String(nLength, "@")), " ", "0"))

End Function

MkTree Function - Make sure that directories exist

robcooper — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:05:00 GMT

Recently, I wrote an application to manage files between directories and needed a function to make sure that the directory structure was the same between the source and destination files. VBA provides a function called MkDir which is used to create a directory, but it requires that the parent directory already exists. Here's a function called MkTree that will walk a path and create all of the directories in the tree for a given file/directory path.

' --------------------------------------------------------------------------
' Function: MkTree
' Purpose : Create directories for a given file name
' Notes   : MkTree "c:\a\b\c\file.txt" would create directories for c:\a\b\c
'           MkTree "c:\a\b\c\" would create c:\a\b\c
'           MkTree "c:\a\b\c" would create c:\a\b
' --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Sub MkTree(ByVal strFile As String)
    ' walk the file and make sure the paths exist
    Dim strRoot As String
    Dim strPath As String
    Dim pos As Integer

    ' get the root
    If (InStr(strFile, ":\") = 2) Then
        strRoot = Left(strFile, InStr(strFile, ":\") + 1)
    ElseIf (InStr(strFile, "\\") = 1) Then
        strRoot = Left(strFile, InStr(InStr(strFile, "\\") + 2, strFile, "\"))
    Else
        MsgBox "Invalid Root Directory", vbExclamation
        Exit Sub
    End If

    pos = InStr(Len(strRoot) + 1, strFile, "\")
    While (pos > 0)
        strPath = Left(strFile, pos)

        ' Create the directory
        On Error Resume Next
        MkDir strPath
        Debug.Assert Err = 0 Or Err = 75
        On Error GoTo 0
        pos = InStr(pos + 1, strFile, "\")
    Wend
End Sub

Easing the transition from Access 2003 to 2007

Erik Rucker — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:59:00 GMT

One of our Access MVPs, Oliver Stohr, has just released his new web site focusing on helping users make the switch from Access 2003 to Access 2007. Oli has some good tutorial content which should be useful for those of you who are just getting started with Access 2007, and also check out his blog. He’s been working with some members of the Access team producing content for Access Advisor Magazine.

http://www.access-freak.com/

Setting Rich Text Formatting Programmatically

Erik Rucker — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Someone asked about setting the formatting for rich text programmatically, and if there was an object model for the text formatting. There isn't, but the text is simply HTML, so it isn't hard to do through code. Here's a trick to see how our text is formatted and to update the HTML manually:

Copy/Paste the text box that has Rich Text
Select the text box
Change the Text Format property on the Data tab to Plain Text
Select a different property to commit the property change and click OK to the warning
Browse the form and edit the data in the Rich Text box

Now you can see the HTML we generate and modify it directly.