Microsoft® Access® 2010 Programmer's Reference

Appendix A. The Access Object Model

By now you've probably read at least a few of the chapters in this book and have realized that there are a lot of tasks you can accomplish by programming in VBA. One concept that should be clear is that to use VBA to manipulate Access, you need some knowledge about the Access object model. It was discussed brie?y in Chapter 5, but as a refresher, an object model is a set of objects and collections that programmers use to manipulate a program.

Microsoft Access has a rich object model that you'll use to manipulate forms, reports, queries, macros, and other components of the Access interface. All in all, there are over 5600 members in the entire Access object model, making it a bit too large to fit completely in this appendix. As such, we've included the properties, methods, and events that are used frequently. Much of the information in this appendix can also be found in some form within the Access Visual Basic Reference Help file.

THE APPLICATION OBJECT

All of the objects and collections in the Access object model are children of the Application object. Every object and collection is related to the Application object through either a direct parent/child relationship or multiple parent/child relationships.

The Application object refers to the currently running instance of Access. You can use the Application object to apply methods or to set or retrieve properties for the entire Access application. For example, you can use the Version property to determine ...