Professional Access 2013 Programming

4

Designing Views

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Becoming familiar with the new view designer
• Understanding how tiles, links, and views work together
• Identifying new controls
• Recognizing what has changed about familiar controls
• Exploring the kind of views you can create and how to use them

Microsoft has introduced a new type of object, which it chose to call “views,” as Access 2013's answer to viewing and manipulating data on the web. Unlike Access 2010 web databases and Data Access Pages, where Microsoft tried to preserve the same design model between the client side and the web side, Access 2013's view is a clean break from the design model for forms and reports in the Access client.

We believe that the clean break is a move in the right direction because fundamentally, designing objects for consumption on the web is a totally different proposition from designing objects for consumption within a client on a Windows desktop. It boils down to the fact that a web application must deal with much more limited scripting functionality, cannot run a database engine inside a web browser, and cannot rely on APIs from the operating system to do some of the more advanced stuff we have come to expect in a client object. Furthermore, web design requires an architecture that is totally disconnected from the database in contrast to Access's traditional approach wherein opening a bound form held open a connection to the database and maintained a pointer on a record within the recordset at all times. ...