Professional Access 2013 Programming

7

Designing the Table Structure

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• New and changed data types
• Using validation rules
• Leveraging calculated fields

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The code and sample downloads for this chapter are found at www.wiley.com/go/proaccess2013prog.com on the Download Code tab. They are in the Maid To Order Sample App download. Refer to the Readme.txt file also located there for installation instructions.

Tables and the fields in them are the basic building blocks of all databases, of course. Table structures and field data types in Access have been quite stable over time, with the exception of Unicode compression, which was introduced in Microsoft Access 2000. In Chapter 2, you learned the basics of table creation in the web app environment. However, the 2013 version of Access also includes changes in data types that you'll find useful, particularly when creating web apps. In this chapter, we concentrate on those changes and how you can use them to optimize your table designs.

Also, although normalization is at the center of all good table structures, we think it's safe to assume that your experience as a developer will guide you in that area; good relational table schema hasn't changed. Instead, we direct your attention to the new and changed elements you'll be using in fields in tables in 2013 to implement your table designs. You learn how to define relationships between tables with the lookup field mechanism, which was first used for that purpose in ...