BeforeUpdate and error handling help needed

[twimms]

I'm a relative newbie to coding (and brand new here!) and I'm in need of some help. Hopefully, someone here will be willing to walk me through this and maybe I'll learn something along the way.

I have a database with a form where I would like to require data to be entered in certain fields. I would like to use the before Update event for this. I would like to check each of the 4 required fields, and if any of them are null, I'd like a message telling the user this and giving them the option of closing the form without saving the data or keep the form open to complete the required fields. One of these required fields is also a required record for another field on the form, so if the user happens to leave that particular field empty, they also trigger the "Record cannot be added or changed because a related record is required..." message. I would like to completely supress and ignore that message since the Before Update event that validates data will already establish this as a required field for the user. The required fields are: strCity. strAddress, strContact, and numCounty.

I should say that I can create the BeforeUpdate event to check for nulls just fine, except that the structure I've used isn't very friendly. There's a better way, but I can't figure out the proper structure. The way I accomplished it, my custom message box appears once for each field that is null, for a total of 4 times, instead of once regardless of how many of those fields are null.

Thanks so much for anyone who is wiiling to help me through this.

[patjones]

Can you post the relevant code that you have so far, and we can go from there? Thanks.

Pat

[NeoPa]

Do you realise there is already a Validation Rule property for the table as a whole?

In Design View of the table, select View / Properties (or Alt-Enter) to view the Properties page.