Access™ 2007 Bible

Chapter 21. Building Multiuser Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding the issues in multiuser applications

• Splitting Access databases

• Configuring Access for multiuser access

• Considering your locking options

• Looking at record-locking errors

• Handling locking errors

• Using unbound forms in multiuser environments

You've created a really nifty application. After you finished your masterpiece, you tested, poked, and prodded it every which way imaginable. Finally, you gave it to your users, who tried it out and thought it was pretty nifty, too. Everything worked the way it was supposed to: The application's form navigation was smooth and quick, queries ran fast, and there were no errors during data entry.

So who is this guy on the other end of the phone line complaining about record locks? You didn't have any record-locking problems during testing. But then again, you didn't test your application in a multiuser environment. After all, Access is supposed to handle all those issues for you, right? Almost, but not quite. There's still a lot you need to know about using Access applications in multiuser environments before you can be confident that users will not encounter unwarranted record locks, frustration, and possible data loss.

This chapter shows you how to avoid some of the pitfalls of failing to plan for multiuser issues when developing applications in Microsoft Access. The key phrase here is failing to plan. In order to create a successful multiuser application, you must anticipate the environment ...