Access™ 2007 Bible

Chapter 33. Reusing VBA Code with Libraries

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding Access libraries

• Comparing libraries with traditional code-sharing techniques

• Building Access libraries

• Establishing library references

• Debugging library databases

• Packaging libraries as .accde files

You'll use many of the techniques described in this book in most of the Access applications you prepare. Common features such as splash screens, data validation, logging, and progress indicators will be used over and over again in different applications. You may be discouraged at the thought of having to program each of these techniques into every Access application you build. After all, some of the techniques described in the Access 2007 Bible require considerable programming and implementation.

A primary objective in most application-development projects is to reuse as much of your programming as possible. People simply cannot afford to write everything from scratch in every project. You'll be happy to know that Access provides a handy method of reusing not only code, but also forms and other database objects. In fact, when you use Access libraries, the improvements you make to a library's contents are shared by all applications using the library.

Access also provides a way to share the more sophisticated aspects of the user interfaces you build among applications. For instance, let's assume you've built a multiform dialog box that allows users to customize the user interface. Using this dialog box, they can choose such ...