Access 2010: The Missing Manual

Delving Deeper into Web Objects

You’ve now seen the entire lifecycle of a web database. You watched as it was created, learned how to upload it to a SharePoint server, and worked with in the browser and in Access. You’ve even seen how to deal with network outages. However, you still haven’t spent much time using your web database in the browser. And while web databases are a great way to share your work with other Access fanatics, they’re even more impressive when they let other people use them with nothing more than a web browser.

The following sections give you a closer look at web objects and fill in a few missing details about their capabilities and limitations.

Web Forms

As you saw earlier in this chapter, standard-issue web forms work beautifully in a browser. Behind the scenes, SharePoint translates your web forms into web pages that are powered by ASP.NET, Microsoft’s premier platform for developing web applications. The result is an interactive page for reviewing and editing data.

Many of the form features you’ve come to rely on work perfectly well on the Web. For example, you can use navigation forms and command buttons to move from one form to another, and you can create forms that show multiple records at once (choose Create→Forms→Multiple Items). You can also create forms that look almost exactly like the Datasheet view you use to edit tables (choose Create→Forms→Datasheet), as shown in Figure 23-16. However, you can’t create split forms, and you can’t use subforms (The ...