Access 2003: Form Relationships

[mattia]

Hello guys, here I am once again asking questions:

1) This is a totally random question: is there in this website a section for Access beginners? A section clearly explaining basic stuff?

2) Here is the serious question: I have two forms labeled "Projects" and "Tasks", respectively. I have dragged the "Tasks" form into the "Projects" form so that now I have in one form projects and tasks together (we will call this form "Unique form" for explanation purposes). The problem is that the "Tasks" section of the "Unique form" includes all of the tasks for all the projects we are working on while, what I would actully like to display is just the tasks for the selected project.

I'll try to be clearer: as I said, I have Projects and Tasks forms in the "Unique form". If I scroll the mouse/hit the page-down key, the Project section changes...which is fine...while the Task section with all the tasks for all the projects stays always the same. I would like the task section to visualize only the tasks for the related project.

How can I do this? Does this have to do with Relationships at all?

Thank you in advance for your answers!

Mattia

[Kevin Wilcox]

Hi Mattia

Obviously there are various how-to's though I'm not sure how they hang together as a beginners guide as I just dip in whenever I think one might help. What I can point you towards is this link http://c85.cemi.rssi.r u/access/Books/ABA/aba01fi.htm#I33 and http://www.mvps.org/access/

On to the immediate issue. What you've done is make frmTasks a subform within frmProjects. This remains frmProjects, not frmUnique. (And I'll now rename frmTasks as sfrmTasks). Yes, it's all about relationships - as you've realised, frmProjects needs to know that you just want to link to the tasks for the current project. So in the design view of frmProjects, select sfrmTasks and open the properties sheet. Under the 'data' tab you'll see 'Link Master Fields' and 'Link Child Fields'. Going back a step or two you should have a field called 'ProjectID in your tblProjects (usually this would be your PK, (primary key), and also a field called ProjectID as an FK (foreign key) in your tblTasks. You should have created a relationship between these tables, linking the two projectID fields. Coming back to the form, you need this projectID field to be linked in both master and child. This will solve the problem.

HTH
Kevin