48. VBA - Class Properties (Programming In Access 2013)

[@OppositeAppearsToBeTrue]

Hi Steve thank you for helping me put the last peace of the programming jigsaw together. Thank you again.

[@samsum13]

thanks for the videos, do you know how do we normally source control these classes, modules, forms, tables.....

[@ProgrammingMadeEZ]

Unfortunately there isn't any current source control system that I am aware of. Perhaps there is a 3rd party tool or application, but Microsoft discontinued it's source control plug in several years ago. In general Access applications don't get big enough for more than a handful of developers to be necessary. When it's that small communication between the developers is much easier and source control is not necessary. However, you could make an application to handle it.

[@HarveyFrench]

Programming See OASIS SVN here dev2dev.de/. it's an Access addin that gives you a ribbon which can be used to export all access objects as text files. I then use git to manage the version history. It works reliably and is worth the money if you want to source control all your stuff.

[@bgray79]

So, I am a novice programmer, and am following your videos, as well as others. I enjoy your teaching and want to say Thank You! I am developing an Inventory Control Application for our plant. I understand that this is a big task for a novice. While watching the videos on Class Modules, I wonder if they are useful or needed for this type of application. I currently have tables for Parts, Suppliers, Supplier Contacts, SupplierPartNumbers (which is a join table), Warehouses, Locations, PartLocations, Categories and Users. Could there be a benefit in using class modules?

[@ProgrammingMadeEZ]

+bgray79 I would say about 95% of Access Databases do not have custom classes. However, I feel this more or less because developers of Access have long gone without them. VBA is not a true OOP language and therefore you do not get all of the benefits that you would from the .NET framework. But there will be times where using a class object would be the best way to handle a problem. For example, I wrote my own ADO and DAO classes to handle data transactions to eliminate JET/ACE engine resources. This increased the speed of transactions and allowed me to reduce the workload of the client app.

[@bgray79]

So ADO does not use the ACE engine nor does DAO use the JET engine?

[@ProgrammingMadeEZ]

+bgray79 The JET engine is the engine used by Access in all versions 2003 and prior. The ACE engine is the newer engine used by Access from 2007 until now. ADO and DAO are drivers that communicate with the engines. You can think of them as language interpreters that offer the communication between your application and the database engine. By using ADO or DAO, you can connect to just about any kind of database management system, but in doing so you leave it up to the engine to handle the actual storage and retrieval of the data. When you use linked tables and do not create a separate connection in your VBA code, then the ACE or JET engine (depending on your version of Access) will actually issue the request to the back end database, receive the data, then interpret that data to native Access storage. Your code then works directly with the ACE/JET engine instead of the actual server that is storing the data. This relaying and re-interpretation can cause significant speed issues when you deploy your front ends to certain enterprise environments because now the front end has to do some database translation.

[@isaacepstein8484]

You write, newcontact.Firstname = "Steve". Then write Debug.Print newContact.FirstName. Why doesn't it just print Steve? Why does it have to go into the clsContact class module? It could just print the value it currently has, i.e. Steve.

[@josephkreifelsii6596]

"Public Property" Sounds like something it's not