Access Cookbook

Provide Record Navigation Buttons on a Form

Problem

You’d like to provide some mechanism for allowing users to move from row to row on a form, but you think the navigation buttons Access provides are too small and unattractive. Also, you can’t control when the user can or can’t move to another row. Can you replace these with your own buttons?

Solution

Access provides navigation buttons for you to use on forms, allowing you to move easily from row to row. However, you can neither move nor resize these buttons, and you can’t change anything about their appearance.

You can create your own buttons, place them on a form, and have each button use the GoToRecord macro action. Unfortunately, this has two drawbacks:

• If you attempt to move to the previous or next row and you’re already at the end of the recordset, the macro will fail. The GoToRecord macro action just isn’t smart enough to work in this case.

• Your buttons will always be available, giving no indication of when you can use them.

To avoid errors, you must use VBA. This solution demonstrates the steps you can take to add the appropriate code to your application so that navigation buttons will move you safely from row to row and shows how to disable the navigation buttons when they are unavailable. The form frmNav in 02-06.MDB (see Figure 2-11) works this way. You can load it and give it a try before attempting to build your own. Use the navigation buttons to move from row to row (there are only a few rows in the table so far). ...