Access Database Design and Programming, Second Edition

The Microsoft Access Object Model

You may have noticed that there are no collections in the DAO object model corresponding to Access forms or reports. The fact is that DAO is not the whole object story. Microsoft Access defines its own collections of objects, as shown in Figure 14.7.

Figure 14-7. The Microsoft Access object model

Access defines the Forms collection to hold all currently open forms. (Note the words “currently open.”) Similarly, the Reports collection holds all currently open reports. The Application, DoCmd and Screen objects are not contained in a collection. The Modules collection holds all open code modules.

The References collection holds all Reference objects. A Reference object is a reference to another application’s type library, which is a file containing information on the objects that the application exposes through Automation. It is through Automation objects that an application can share some of its features with other applications. However, we will not go further into this subject in this book. (Allow me to recommend my book Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming with Visual Basic, published by Springer-Verlag (ISBN 0-387-94889-9), for more information on OLE Automation geared toward the Visual Basic programmer.)

As you can see in Figure 14.7, Microsoft has added several new objects to the object model for Access 9 for Office 2000. (In fact, there are a ...