Alison Balteramp;#039;s Mastering Microsoft Office Access 1002003 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Using the Database Documenter

The Database Documenter is an elegant tool that is part of the Access application. It enables you to selectively produce varying levels of documentation for each object in your database. To use the Database Documenter, follow these steps:

TIP

To document all objects in the database, click the All Object Types tab and then click Select All.

CAUTION

Access can take quite a bit of time to produce the requested documentation, particularly if you select numerous objects. For this reason, you should not begin the documentation process if you will soon need your computer to accomplish other tasks. While Access is processing this task, switching to another application becomes difficult if not impossiblehow difficult depends on the amount of RAM installed on your system, as well as the type of processor (CPU) installed on your computer and its speed.

NOTE

To document the properties of the database or the relationships between the tables in the database, click the Current Database tab and select Properties or Relationships.

After you select all the desired objects and options and click OK, the Object Definition window appears. You can use this Print Preview window to view the documentation output for the objects you selected (see Figure 29.12). This Print Preview window is just like any other Print Preview window; you can view each page of the documentation and send the documentation to the printer.

Using the Documenter Options

By default, the Database Documenter outputs a huge volume of information for each selected object. For example, the Database Documenter documents each control on a form, including every property of the control. It is easy to produce 50 pages of documentation for a couple of database objects. Besides being a tremendous waste of paper, this volume of information is overwhelming to review. Fortunately, you can refine the level of detail provided by the Documenter for each category of object you are documenting. Just click the Options button in the Database Documenter dialog box.

Figure 29.13 shows the table definition options. Notice that you can specify whether you want to print table Properties, Relationships, and Permissions by User and Group. You also can indicate the level of detail you want to display for each field: Nothing; Names, Data Types, and Sizes; or Names, Data Types, Sizes, and Properties. For table indexes, you can opt to include Nothing; Names and Fields; or Names, Fields, and Properties.

If you select the Queries tab in the Documenter dialog box and then click Options, the Print Query Definition dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 29.14. Here, you can select the level of detail the Database Documenter will output for the selected queries. You can choose whether to include Properties, SQL, Parameters, Relationships, and Permissions by User and Group for the query. You also can select the level of detail for each column of the query and for the indexes involved in the query.

The Form and Report options are similar to one another. Figure 29.15 shows the Print Form Definition dialog box. Here, you can specify whether you want to print Properties, Code, and Permissions by User and Group for a form. For each control on the form, you can choose to print Nothing, the Names of the controls, or the Names and Properties of the controls. The Print Report Definition dialog box offers the same options. Both dialog boxes offer a Properties button, used to designate the categories of properties that the Database Documenter prints. You can opt to print Other properties, Event properties, Data properties, or Format properties.

For macros, you can choose whether you want to print macro Properties, Actions and Arguments, or Permissions by User and Group. For modules, you can choose to view Properties, Code, and Permissions by User and Group.

As you can see, the Database Documenter gives you great flexibility in the level of detail it provides. Of course, if you haven't filled in the properties of an object (for example, the description), it does you no good to ask the Documenter to print those properties.

Producing Documentation in Other Formats

After you produce the documentation and it appears in the Object Definition Print Preview window, you can output it to other formats. From the Print Preview window, choose File, Export. The Export Report dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 29.16. You can output the documentation to Microsoft Excel, HTML, Text Files, a Rich Text Format file, a Snapshot format, or XML. Enter the filename, select Save As Type, and then click Export. If you select the Autostart check box, the Documenter creates the file and then launches you into the appropriate application, depending on your registry entries. If Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) is the application associated with the file extension HTML, for example, Autostart launches IE with your Documenter output loaded when you output to an HTML file. Similarly, if you choose a Microsoft Excel file format and Excel is associated through the registry with XLS file types, Autostart launches Excel with the output loaded in Excel when the process is complete. The same holds true for the other file typesRTF and TXT and their respective registry associations, which usually are Word and Notepad.