Should I Use Reports At All?

[ChipR]

Currently, I have a Print button on each of my forms that sets the background color of the form and subforms to white, calls the print dialog with DoCmd.RunCommand acCmdPrint, then changes the backgrounds back. The forms are not bound to recordsets, I use code to find the record based on a combo box selection and fill in all the unbound fields and the source for the subform. So that way it only prints the one record. Is it bad to do this and should I be using reports somehow instead?

[Stewart Ross]

Hi Chip. If you are using unbound forms you must be filling the control values from VBA code you have written yourself; with no recordsource Access cannot use its recordsource binding to fill the controls for you. Whatever your reasons for this, there is no advantage to you in using an Access report for printing - as you have no suitable recordsource for your report you will simply have to use a set of unbound controls there too and fill their values in code all over again.

What you are doing at present may not be ideal but if it works for you why change it?

It would be so much simpler to use or create a proper recordsource for your form, however. Then you could use that recordsource for a simple Access report without all the work you are causing yourself right now...

The normal solution to what you are doing is to either use dynamic binding - where you set the recordsource of your form dynamically in response to the After Update event of your combo - or to apply a filter to the recordsource of your form again from the After Update event of your combo. Both of these approaches could be used with reports as well. Setting or filtering the recordsource dynamically allows the normal Access binding of controls - much more efficiently and effectively than doing this task in VBA yourself.

-Stewart

[missinglinq]

@ChipR
If your only reason for doing all this with an unbound form is so that you can print a single record at a time, you're going to a great deal of unnecessary trouble! You certainly can print a report of a single record with a bound form.

Linq ;0)>

[ChipR]

I had a bunch of unbound fields that I calculated in my On Current event, because when I wrote functions in the source of the text boxes, it was very very slow. So I had most of the form filled out by code already, and just switched it to unbound and filled in the rest when I wanted to set up printing.

I did finally try out a report and I found the Group function is what I needed and couldn't do with subforms in continous forms. I will definitely be using reports in the future.

Thank you for the answers!