Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

751

CHAPTER

Building Multiuser

Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

Setting up your multiuser

applications on a network

Determining how your Access

database will be opened

Improving performance by

splitting your Access

database

Considering your locking

options and handling locking

errors

Getting more control over

your application with

unbound forms

Y

ou’ve created a really nifty application. After finishing your master-
piece, you tested, poked, and prodded it every which way imagin-
able. Finally, you gave it to your users, who tried it out and thought
it was pretty nifty, too. Everything worked the way it was supposed to: The
application’s form navigation was smooth and quick, queries ran fast, and
there were no errors during data entry.

So who is this guy on the other end of the phone line complaining about
record locks? You didn’t have any record-locking problems during testing.
But then again, you didn’t test your application in a multiuser environment.
After all, Access is supposed to handle all those issues for you, right?

Almost, but not quite. There’s a lot you need to know about using Access
applications in multiuser environments before you can be confident that users
won’t encounter unwarranted record locks, frustration, and possible data loss.

This chapter shows you how to avoid some of the pitfalls of failing to plan
for multiuser issues when developing applications in Microsoft Access. The
key phrase here is failing to plan. In order to create a successful multiuser
application, you must anticipate the environment in which the application
will run (single-user, multiuser, desktop, network, and so on), and you must
take into consideration what kind of database application you’re developing
(data entry, client-server, and so on). This chapter covers some of the plan-
ning issues you should keep in mind and ways to handle problems you
might encounter, as well as explaining how to take advantage of Access’s
record-locking mechanism to prevent data loss or corruption when multiple
users are trying to update records concurrently.

The Access record-locking mechanism is designed to prevent accidental data
loss or corruption by controlling which of several users is able to make