Beginning Access 2003 VBA

Chapter 11. Finishing the Application

After working so hard to develop an advanced Access application using VBA, it is important to make sure that the application is capable of performing well and handling the number of users you expect. You also want to make sure that the end users are not able to modify the database source code and design without the proper permission. After you have fine-tuned, secured, and tested the application, you are ready to implement the application by distributing it to end users. However, after you distribute the application to end users, your job is still not finished. Access applications need to be backed up and compacted periodically to ensure that they remain in good working order and that they can be recovered from a backup if corruption or deletion occurs.

This chapter covers:

• Writing applications to handle multiple users

• Improving actual and perceived performance of the application

• Using the Performance Analyzer to help improve performance

• Adding security to prevent unauthorized access or modification

• Distributing applications to end users

• Backing up, compacting, and repairing applications

Multi-User Considerations

Various coding approaches can affect how well your application will handle multiple users. For example, the type of record lock that is used on records retrieved from the database will affect what happens when multiple users try to access the same record. When the application does not handle the scenario correctly, update conflicts can occur ...