Forms in Layout View - Part 2

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this lesson, we're going to continue working on our form in Layout View.
• 00:09 Now, one thing I did off camera between this lesson and
• 00:13 the last one was that I closed down the form that we were working on,
• 00:18 and I named it as form ticket maintenance.
• 00:21 So let's double click to reopen the form.
• 00:25 Now I'm going to go into Layout View again.
• 00:29 And we're going to bring up the property sheet for this form.
• 00:33 So let's click on Property Sheet.
• 00:35 And because I'm clicked on the ID field,
• 00:37 notice I'm currently looking at all of the properties specifically for that ID field.
• 00:43 So I can see that this ID field is a text box.
• 00:46 And then I have all of the different properties that I can change.
• 00:50 Now one thing to notice here, we have the name of the field and
• 00:54 then we have a label name.
• 00:56 And the label name is the very generic label 34.
• 00:59 And you'll notice this more if we click the drop down,
• 01:03 we have lots and lots of unnamed labels in here.
• 01:06 So what I would recommend that you do is that you go through and
• 01:09 give all of your labels meaningful names.
• 01:11 For example, if I click on this label just here,
• 01:14 I can see that is the technician label.
• 01:17 So I'm going to give this label a name of technician label so it's easy to identify.
• 01:24 So now when I click the drop down, I can see that there it is,
• 01:27 that's a lot more meaningful.
• 01:29 So I'm going to go through and rename all of these labels off camera, so
• 01:34 join me back here in a couple of moments.
• 01:36 So now I rename those labels, when I click that drop down,
• 01:39 notice that this looks a lot more meaningful.
• 01:42 It's much easier to identify which field it is that we're currently editing.
• 01:48 And I always like to do one last sweep through this list to make sure that I
• 01:52 don't have any other unnamed items.
• 01:55 So if I scroll through looks like pretty much everything is named.
• 01:57 I can see here text 39.
• 02:00 Let's click this, that's the ticket number.
• 02:03 So let's change this to ticket number.
• 02:08 Now the other thing that's important to know in this property
• 02:12 sheet is that the caption name is the actual label that user see.
• 02:16 So a lot of the time when I'm naming things like labels,
• 02:20 I won't put a space in between two words.
• 02:22 But I want the caption to show spaces because that's what it's going to look
• 02:26 like to use it.
• 02:28 So for example, if I click on the ticket number label just here,
• 02:32 notice that the caption in the Property Sheet doesn't have a space in the middle.
• 02:37 But I'm going to add one, like so.
• 02:40 And you can see that that is updated on the form.
• 02:43 So let's do the same for customer name, space, click away.
• 02:49 And then the only other one down here is date lot.
• 02:52 So let's click on the label and give that a space as well.
• 02:55 So that looks a lot more user friendly.
• 02:58 So that's my first piece of advice.
• 03:00 When you're designing forms, make sure that you go through, label everything,
• 03:05 so it's easy to identify and also make sure that your labels are user friendly.
• 03:10 Now I want to finish finish this lesson just by going back to a point I made last
• 03:14 lesson.
• 03:15 And that is, with the current way that we have this form set up, if we're working
• 03:20 in form view, any user can go in and make changes to any of these records.
• 03:24 And that has the potential to be really dangerous.
• 03:28 Particularly with this ID field at the top, that is such a crucial field,
• 03:32 it's our primary key.
• 03:34 We don't really want people being able to click here and
• 03:36 change this to something else because that could break our entire database.
• 03:40 So what you can do is basically lock different fields so
• 03:44 that nobody can edit them.
• 03:46 So we're going to lock or protect the ID field.
• 03:51 So for this, we're going to go back into Layout View,
• 03:54 make sure that you have the ID field selected.
• 03:57 And then over in the Property Sheet,
• 04:00 we're going to scroll down until we find find the enabled option.
• 04:05 Now notice that currently it's set to yes, so
• 04:08 we're going to double click to toggle that to no.
• 04:11 And there's a very small change that's occurred,
• 04:14 the field background has now turned to gray.
• 04:16 And if I try and click somewhere in that field to make any changes, I can't do it.
• 04:21 All of the other fields are still unlocked, but this one is now disabled.
• 04:25 So now if we switch back to Form View, notice that I can't edit that ID field,
• 04:31 but I can still edit every other field.
• 04:35 Now the final point to mention here,
• 04:37 if we use the record selector to add a new blank record, like so.
• 04:42 Notice that the ID number doesn't get assigned until you actually
• 04:46 enter information in your first field.
• 04:48 So I really need to add a ticket number in here before it's going to assign that ID.
• 04:55 Now, what about if you get partway through a record,
• 04:58 and you decide that you no longer want that record?
• 05:01 What we would need to do here is press the Escape key on our keyboard, and
• 05:06 that's going to remove all of that information from that new record.

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