Programming Tab Controls

MS-Access tab controls offer a method to present multiple groups of similar data, making it easy for user to locate specifics within an intuitive & user-friendly layout - very much like an Excel workbook. The main control is of course called a Tab Control, and the tabs within it are called Pages.

For example, you might have a main form where you select a customer, and then you have a tab control that has pages that display related data for such things as Contacts, Sales, Invoices, Payments, Credit Data and so on. Usually each tab has a subform that contains the data related to the current selection from the main screen.

However, when you access the tab using VBA, there are few variations that are not exactly clear in the online documentation.

For starters, when you place a control on a tab, the Parent is actually the Main Form, not page of the the tab control. So if you have a main form called "main_form", a tab control named "MyTab", and several pages named Page1, Page2, and Page3 - and then - you place a command button Button1 on Page1, the full reference to that control is

Forms!main_form!Button1

...note that the Page number has no effect on that. Therefore, when you have a form with one or more tabs controls, you must be careful to use a unique name for each of the controls, whether on the main form, or on any of the tabs.

If you wish to detect which tab has been clicked, you will use the OnChange event; in this example when you click the first tab Page1 which happens to have a page index of 1, the MyTab value will be 1 -- so to get the name of the page you will need to use

Private Sub MyTab_Change()
With Me
MsgBox .MyTab.Pages(.MyTab).Name
End With
End Sub

to get the name of the page that was clicked.

SQL - list columns in a table, updated, again

The code has been updated again, this time instead of using sp_columns we are using the system tables directly. This provides access to additional data, such as whether the column is computed. Plus, in the event that Microsoft changes sp_columns - that would not break our code.

One significant change since the previous January 2012 version is that option 4 now provides a skeleton for an insert stored procedure - all of the column names are provided with data types in a DECLARE statement as parameters, followed by the INSERT for column names, and finally the SELECT statement that references the parameters. In this option, the code is excluding non-updating columns such as identity, timestamp, image, or any computed columns.

In all prior versions, we bracket [] any columns that have non-alphanumeric characters such as spaces or hyphens. In order to accommodate the #4 option, we have a large REPLACE statement to convert those to underscores. If you have any other characters to exclude, you can edit the REPLACE (which occurs in two places) to make the corrections.

EDIT ON 10/20/2012 - this new rewrite of the wm_columns will not work on views, because sp_tables actually pulls in both tables and views; where of course sys.tables only looks at tables. Hmmm. I will probably add one more option to this, so views will be back in the list.

SQL - list columns in a table, updated

Way back in April 2009, I had published the original version of my stored procedure wm_columns which can be used instead of sp_help or sp_columns to view a list of column names for a table or view.

The new version has a number of enhancements, and you can view the complete code here.

The first parameter is required, which is the name of a table or view, such as:
wm_columns 'my_table'
...and the default schema is dbo

You may also include the schema, e.g. in AdventureWorks you can use this:
wm_columns 'Person.Contact'

The second parameter is optional, and has the following choices:

0 = display the column list in physical order
1 = display the column list in alphabetical order
2 = display a select statement
3 = display an insert statement
4 = display an insert statement, with data types added as comments

For the options 2, 3, and 4, column names are bracketed with [] if they contain spaces or other non-alphanumeric characters.

For the options 3 and 4, any identity or timestamp columns are displayed but commented-out.

The third parameter, when used with option 0 or 1, allows you to apply a fuzzy filter to the column name, for example:

wm_columns 'my_table',0,'id'
...will list only the columns that contain 'id' in the name.

The third parameter, when used with option 2, allows to you use an alias for the table, for example in AdventureWorks:

wm_columns 'Person.CountryRegion',2,'cr'
...will display a select statement like this:
SELECT
cr.CountryRegionCode,
cr.Name,
cr.ModifiedDate
FROM
Person.CountryRegion cr