Datasheet

Designing Applications

The purpose of the post-implementation review is not just to give everyone a chance to whine

and moan about what went wrong. Instead, the purpose is to identify the changes that need to

be made to your project methodology and practices to make sure that the same problems don't

happen again next time. At the same time, it is an opportunity to identify the successes and to

make sure that the benefits of these can be reaped by future projects.

A final benefit of conducting post-implementation reviews is that it gives an appropriate

opportunity for recognizing the efforts and contributions of everyone who worked on the

project. Sincere praise in response to specific achievements is essential to the self-respect of

individual developers and the continued morale of the team as a whole.

Further Reading

OK, that's enough for now on the theory behind designing and delivering software projects. If

you want to learn some more about this subject there is ample reading material available, but

perhaps one of the most interesting books on this subject is "Clouds to Code" (Wrox Press, 1998,

ISBN 1-861000-95-2) in which Jesse Liberty documents the design and delivery of a real project

with no holds barred. But this is where we leave behind the theory. From now on, this book

will be a hands-on guide with real code examples for you to try out yourself and as we go

through the book, we will rapidly find that we are building up a fully functional Access application.

The Ice Cream Shop Application

Once we have completed the design phase of our project, we should be in a position to answer

the two following questions:

❑ What data items (or entities) and application objects will we need?

❑ How should these entities and objects fit together?

This book is not about how to design the data items and other application objects that make up

the application. We are assuming that you know enough about tables, forms, reports, and

queries from your previous exploration of Access. This book is about how you use VBA (Visual

Basic for Applications) to control the way that these objects interoperate as part of a larger

system. In one sense, VBA can be thought of as the 'glue' that holds the whole application together.

The best way to understand how VBA fits in is, of course, not through theory but through

practice. In the rest of this chapter, we will run through the process of starting to create an

application – the Ice Cream Shop database that accompanies this book. At a certain point we

will hit a brick wall, when we try to automate our application and get it to display some

intelligence. We'll then look at the two options available to us for solving the problem: VBA or

macros. We will see why VBA is often the best and sometimes the only satisfactory choice.

You may find that this section covers a lot of familiar territory. However, if you do take the time

to read it, it will acquaint you with the structure of the Ice Cream Shop database so that, when the

crunch comes, and we have to use VBA, we will have a familiar database structure to work with.