I was under the impression that making forms unbound gives you
a) more control
b) made the form load up quicker
c) makes it quicker for updates to be made, as in when an update is made, the table is not locked by the user.
I can see why you think to stay clear of populating unbound datasheets - its not easy to do! At the end of the say, i want it to say the primary key and the name of the person in a list, when the user clicks on that record, all the other details are loaded up in another subform. No locked reocrds, no errors associated with those locked records.
I think I know what you mean. You want an unbound form that can display the data one record at a time, allow the user to edit, then save the data. If that is what you want, this is how I do it.
Create your form with bound data so that each control on the form has the same name as the field in the recordset. Then set the control source of all the control to blank, i.e. unbind the form, and remove the recordsource for the form.
In the form footer, have a combo box that has the record set you want. Call this, say Select Record.
When the users picks a record from the combobox, use the key from that record to open a recordset of just 1 row, with all the fieldnames you want to display.
You can now either say
name=rs!name
title=rs!title
etc
or be clever and write something that loops through all the fields in the recordset, something like
me.rs(fld.name)=rs(fld.value) 'This is not correct, but something like it.
Then close the recordset. Your user is now looking at the unbound data and can make changes.
you then have to write a save button and put code behind it to
Open the recordset of 1 record
rs.edit
update all the fields that have changed
rs.update
close the recordset
You would also have to do all your validation before saving and take account of someone else changing the data from when you grabbed it to when you put it back.
It can be done and yes, it makes the system run a lot faster and stops locking errors. I wrote a system like this for Nat West Bank in Access 2. It took me about 1 week to get the generic open, edit,save,delete,add new stuff working, and nearly 2 months to get reliable generic error handling to handle all the changed records, locks etc.