Designing Effective Database Systems

Chapter 18. Choosing Windows Controls

In Chapter 17, we looked at various ways to structure forms based on how the entities represented in them are related. In this chapter, we’ll look at how to match specific controls to certain kinds of logical data.

Two basic principles apply to choosing controls. The most important is to choose the control that best matches the way users think about the data—in other words, to match the users’ mental model. Secondarily, you should limit user input to the narrowest possible range of values.

People who work with databases tend to think of data as textual values. If you open a recordset in datasheet view in Microsoft Access, as shown in Figure 18-1, all the fields are shown as text. But in fact only the Customer-Name ...