Comments on: Creating Classes from Access Tables

By: Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:27:00 +0000

Dick, that sounds like a date. I think there is definitley some potential symbiosis here, so I will let you know when we have something to show. Don’t expect it to be soon, progress on a collabarative effort is slow, especially when it is just a side of the table affair.

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:22:00 +0000

Bob: Sounds interesting. I started this based on some work I was doing with Ruby on Rails. It does everything soup to nuts. All you do is create the database, and it handles all the CREATE and DROP statements so that your database is managed completely within the Rails framework. I didn’t want to go that far because it would be too much work. Maybe as each of us gets further along, we should see about combining them.

By: Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:41:00 +0000

Hey Dick, I have started a collabarative effort with some guys over at VBAExpress to build a database generator. The original aime was to capture some definitions of the database and then build the database on the fly (a bit like the table driven menu builders). My original idea was just an Excel table, and some clas modules at the back to handle the different database types. I started this collabaration partly because I felt the tool could be useful, more as a way of doing a collabarative project to see what evolved out of a group as against a singleton.

We are already talking multiple front-ends (Excel tables, Access databases, foems, et al), which would generate XML defintions that are passed to a COM backend. This might make an interesting addition, the data discovery would not be necessary as the inputs would be defining them when defining the database.

By: Egon

Egon — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:17:00 +0000

Dick, once you get to a stage you’re happy with, it might actually be a very good project to open source – it seems like just about every current language but VBA has an open source Data Access Layer code generator (or some other kind of data persistence tool). I could see this being pretty useful for a lot of people.

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:03:00 +0000

I’ll check out ADOX, thanks Rob. It sounds like we should open source this project. I think it would be the first open source VBA project ever!

By: Hans Schraven

Hans Schraven — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:53:00 +0000

To create a classmodule with some code

Sub newclassmodule()
With ActiveWorkbook.VBProject.VBComponents.Add(vbext_ct_ClassModule)
.Name = "testklasse"
.CodeModule.AddFromString Replace("private Sub gemakkelijk ()# ' Dit is slechts een voorbeeld # End Sub", "#", vbCr)
End With
End Sub

By: Hugh Lerwill

Hugh Lerwill — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:08:00 +0000

Writing/ injecting code with code. Does this help at all?

a$ = "Private Sub Workbook_Open()" & vbCr & _
"Worksheets(1).Unprotect" & vbCr & _
"Worksheets(1).Range(""B9?").value = Replace$(Name,"".xls"","""")" & vbCr & _
"Worksheets(1).Range(""A7?").value = ""Current filename "" & Path & """" & Name" & vbCr & _
"Worksheets(1).Protect" & vbCr & _
"Saved = True" & vbCr & _
"End Sub"
.ActiveWorkbook.VBProject.VBComponents.Item("ThisWorkbook").CodeModule.AddFromString (a$)

My contents of a$ are just an example of something I have running; please replace it with something which is useful to you. Watch out for those double double quotes!

By: Bert

Bert — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0000

I looked into this type of thing awhile ago. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any object-relational mapping (ORM) tool or any other kind of persistence tool for VBA. Closest thing I found was JCFramework for VB6, but it looked too complex to quickly port to VBA, so I just abandoned the idea. But I wish you well in your adventures with this more lightweight framework, Dick.

By: Rob Bruce

Rob Bruce — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:22:00 +0000

I reckon ADOX (Microsoft ADO Extensions for DDL and Security) would be a better bet for discovery of tables within your database and their fields and data types.

Rob