[Access 2000] Create subsidiary records in related (1-1) tables?

[Jonathan Fisher]

What¹s the appropriate way to create records in related, subsidiary
tables when a record is created in a main table?

I¹m using Access 2000, and I have a main table called tblProject, and a
few other tables in one-to-one relationships with it (on the field
ProjectKey), called tblProjectAccou nting, tblProjectSales , etc. (I
separated them to get around the limit of 255 fields, and to make
record-locking more flexible.)

My first thought was to let Access manage the relationship, and hope
that it would create the subsidiary records automatically -- but that
way, when I try to type into a new record, I get error messages like
³You cannot add or change a record because a related record is required
in table ŒtblProjectAcco unting¹.²

So I tried to create the subsidiary records in the Form_BeforeInse rt()
procedure, but the ProjectKey field in tblProject doesn¹t seem to be
valid at that point; if I try to use AutoNumbers for ProjectKey, its
value is null, but if I try to generate my own key values and save them
to ProjectKey, I get error-messages like ³Index or primary key cannot
contain a Null value.²

I also considered putting in a button ³Create Project Record², and only
allowing the user to create new records under programmatic control, but
it looked like a pain to remove the navigation buttons and create my own
that would special-case the ³forward² button for the case of creating a
new record; and I couldn¹t find any documentation about disabling the
³New Record² menu-item.

TIA,
Jonathan