Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Inside Out

Validating Complex Data

Although you can certainly take advantage of the Input Mask property and the field and table Validation Rule properties, your application often has additional business rules that you can enforce only by adding code behind the forms you provide to edit the data. The following examples show you how several of the business rules in the LawTrack Contacts and Housing Reservations applications are enforced with Visual Basic code.

Checking for Possible Duplicate Names

When you design a table, you should attempt to identify some combination of fields that will be unique across all records to use as your primary key. However, when you create a table to store information about people, you usually create an artificial number as the ...