Access Cookbook

Build an Object Inventory

Problem

To document your application, you’d like to be able to create a list of all the objects in your databases, including their owners, date of creation, and date of last update. You’re sure you can do it manually, but is there a better way to create a table containing all this information?

Solution

Access’s Data Access Objects (DAO) can give you the information you need. By programmatically working your way through each of Access’s container collections, you can add a row to an inventory table for each object in your application, storing information about that object. You should be able to use the techniques for this operation to write your own code for enumerating other collections in Access. There are a few tricks along the way, which this solution discusses, but in general this is a straightforward project.

To create an object inventory for your applications, take only two steps:

1. Import the form zsfrmInventory from 04-02.MDB into your own application.

2. Load and run the form. As it opens, it builds the object inventory, saving the data in zstblInventory. If you want to rebuild the inventory once the form’s up, click the Rebuild Object Inventory button. This recreates the inventory table and fills it with information about all the objects in your database. Figure 4-4 shows the form once it’s been run on a sample database.

   

   Figure 4-4. The inventory-creating ...