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Lesson 1 for
Friday, October 16, 2009
 Introduction
Basic concepts
This tutorial is on
Application Development with Microsoft Access.
Let's define what wewill be doing:
•
Application:
a series of programs or computer codes that execute tasks thata user wants done.Maintaining a list of your friends' addresses and phone numbers is a personalapplication.Producing the weekly payroll for 100 employees of a business is a commercialapplication.Running a computer model to forecast tomorrow's weather is a scientificapplication.We will look at
commercial
applications only. We'll leave the scientific stuff to the people at M.I.T.
•
Development:
design, create, make, build all the parts of the application.Analyze: talk to the client (the user) to find-out what he wants. If you don'thave a user handy, use your imagination and prior knowledge to guess whata user would want.Design: create a
model
of the system. A model is like a blueprint to abuilder. It is a drawing or a description of some kind of what the system willlook like when finished. When you determine how things will work and howproblems will be solved. You do that
before
you start to write computer code.Create: write the application using the software - Access, in this case. Andwhile you're creating you're also testing and debugging to make sure thatwhat you create works the way it's supposed to work.
•
Microsoft Access:
Access is part of Microsoft Office. However, it is notincluded in the basic suite with Word and Excel. You need to get
MicrosoftOffice Professional Edition
to have Access.Obviously, if you intend to do this tutorial we have to assume that you haveaccess to Access. It really is impossible to do otherwise.We are using Access 2000. You could do just as well with Access 97. Anyapplication created in Access 2000 can be converted to the previous version
 
of Access and any application created in Access 97 can be used in Access2000. The sample applications are all in Access 2000.
Lesson 2 Designing the application
The "Video Store"
To illustrate how to use Access in a commercial application we'll use a business that almosteveryone is somewhat familiar with: the local video rental store.Let's say that the store,
Mike's Video
, is going to open for business in a few weeks and theowner, Mike, wants to have a database application ready to go for opening day.You,
the Analyst
, will sit down with Mike and you will question him on what he wants toget from the computer application. Then you will draw the plans for the application, whichwe call
the model
, and you will check with him again to make sure you haven't forgottenanything. Only then will you actually start to write the application in Access.
Defining the application
Why does Mike want a database in the first place?There are actually two main reasons.1.This is rather obvious: he is going to be renting thousands of movies tothousands of customers. There has to be a system in place to track who haswhat movie, when it was rented, when it was returned, if it was late, if it waslost, who to call to get it back, etc.
2.
To succeed in business you have to
analyze
your business: Who are yourcustomers - men? women? old? young? What are they renting? What's sellingand what isn't? What do you have on the shelves that is gathering dust? Whatare they asking for?So, a
well-designed
database application will meet both those requirements. It will do theroutine sales management and, it will allow the user to do all the sales analysis he needs todo to make the business prosper.You have to keep both of those basic needs in mind when you work on the design.
Commercial requirements design
This is the part where we identify what has to be done to make the application perform allthe commercial functions it has to have.First, a word of warning: Since you're just beginning with this, we'll keep the exercicesimple. We know that there are many functions that you can do in the video store: rent
 
DVDs, rent VHS movies, rent games, buy previously-viewed movies, buy popcorn, chips andcola, rent machines, etc. We won't cover all of those. Which is what you should be doingwhen you do it for real: design the
core application
and get it working then, add otherfunctions to it.Our core application is to track the rentals of movies, DVDs and games. We'll leave thepopcorn and Pepsi for another session.The first thing you will discover is that there are 2
entities
that you are working with. An
entity
is something you keep data on, an object that acts on other objects.In this application they are:
Customers
and
Movies
. We'll use the term "Movies" todescribe our products even if they are DVDs or games or whatever.Now, take out your pencil and paper and make a list of all the data, we call them
fields
,that you have to keep for each entity. You should get something like this: 
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