Professional Access 2013 Programming

5

Creating Queries and Writing Expressions

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding how queries are created and stored
• Examining what has changed in Query Designer
• Using parameters in a query
• Enumerating query capabilities
• Identifying new functions, operators, and constants for query and macro expressions

Of the various components in Access, queries are probably the least changed; therefore, many query features should be familiar to you if you're coming from client Access. You still have the same query designer that allows you to add tables, join them in certain ways, select fields to display, and apply sorting and filtering just as you've always done. You may also be pleased to find that in comparison to support for web queries in Access 2010 web databases, the feature set for queries created in Access web apps is larger. While the feature set is still smaller than in the Access client, this chapter assesses the new architecture driving the creation of queries. Though the query designer looks familiar, you will learn how queries themselves are stored as SQL Server objects and how the designer is used to create and modify them. We will guide you through actions that are different from the client query designer, such as saving and previewing results from a query. Finally, we'll come to the biggest change presented in queries: new SQL syntax, expressions, and functions. By the end of this chapter, you should have all the tools you need to make the transition from the SQL dialect you ...