Resolved: Switchboard Crash Course (97 SR2)

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On the Menu bar, choose Tools/Add Ins/Switchboard Manager. Then Select your switchboard and click Edit. You can add new items from here. This is easier than editing the Switchboard Items table, but if you need to do it in the table because you exceeded the maximum number of items that the Switchboard Manager handles, post back.

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Thomas,

I’m all over this… will report back…

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Thomas,

Hey man, that was quick and easy (except for the fact that the table had a bad record which slowed me down a bit); otherwise that was the tip I was looking for!

Thanks!

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I’m being a bit lazy here… I need a crash course in how to add a few reports to the “menu” system of an Access app that uses the Switchboard.

I’ve got the reports ready to go and just want to bolt them to the existing Reports menu of the switchboard. I’ve dinked around with table entries but I’m lost.

Anyone care to offer a “Add items to the Switchboard 101” class?

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BTW: I would recommend creating a macro to open the report(s). Then you can have the Switchboard item “Run a macro” to open your desired report.

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Mark,

Somebody else wrote this puppy; I’m just going to snap in the reports and turn the users loose on the thing again. If I’m going to change the “architecture”, I’ll re-write the thing….

Thanks, though, I’ll remember this for MY apps.

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Here’s another approach to remember. I never put my reports on the switchboard because that requires using the switchboard manager (or editing the table directly–bad idea). And if you get too many reports, you wind up having to diddle with the number of items per page or add more report pages to the switchboard.

What I do instead is create a custom property for my reports called DisplayName and I populate that with the name I want to show up in lists of reports. Then I pop up an unbound form that uses code to retrieve a list of report name/displayname pairs to populate a listbox. The user clicks on the displayname they want to run (the report name is hidden and would only confuse them) and the form obligingly opens the report for them and then closes itself.

When you need to add a new report, all you have to do is open the maintenance form that allows you to choose a report and enter a displayname for it. If you no longer want to show a report or you want to reserve it for administrators who can get into the database window, just set the displayname to an empty string and it no longer gets returned by the code that builds the list. Simple.

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Charlotte,

Excellent idea. I’ll keep this in mind too.

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Do you have a sample that can be uploaded to show what you are talking about? I am talking about the CODE that is used to retrieve a list of report name/displyname pairs to populate a listbox…..

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Which thread would you like an answer in? You a thread on the same topic here.

To answer your question, yes, I have demos in several versions; but how good is your VBA? Some of the code can be dropped in and used, but the forms will require a certain amount of care and feeding.

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