Access Cookbook

List All Users with Blank Passwords

Problem

As database administrator, you need to ensure that every member of your workgroup has an Access password. You can use the NewPassword method to create a new password, and you understand why you can’t retrieve the value of a user’s password, but you need a way to find out whether a user has established a password yet. You’d like to create a list of all users, indicating which ones don’t have passwords. How can you do this?

Solution

You can’t retrieve users’ passwords, but there’s an easy way to find out if a user has a blank password: simply try to log onto the user’s account using a blank password. If you succeed, you know the user has no password. With a lot of users this becomes a tiresome process, but fortunately, you can automate it using DAO and the CreateWorkspace method.

The frmUserPasswords form fills a table with a list of users and whether their passwords are blank and then presents this information to you in a list box. To test it, open and run frmUserPasswords from 10-07.MDB. Figure 10-21 shows the form in use for a sample workgroup.

Figure 10-21. frmUserPasswords shows users and password status for a sample workgroup

To use this information in your own applications, follow these steps:

1. Create a table to hold the information. Either import the table tblUsers from 10-07.MDB, or use the information in Table 10-16 to create your ...