Access Europe – Alan Cossey (SMOG)
Alan Cossey will be demonstrating his Standard Module Object Generation (SMOG) application. This is an Access add-in used to generate VBA code which provides compile-time error checking and Intellisense for database objects such as tables and queries as well as their fields, records, parameters and so on, thus making code-writing quicker and more robust.
The meeting was held on Wednesday 1 June at 18:00 (6PM) UK time (currently UTC+1).
This is equivalent to 19:00 (7PM) in Central Europe / CEST (UTC+2) and 10AM in Seattle / PDT (UTC-7)
For other local times, see https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
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Alan’s background is Natural Sciences. After getting his degree in Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1980, he started work as a production chemist at an agrochemical company before gradually moving into more general management.
He got nudged into IT in the mid-1990s and was asked to support a solution entirely in Access, which had been created rather than wait for the IT department to do it in VB6 and Oracle. This was Alan’s introduction to Access and its ability to often create solutions more rapidly and cheaply than any other development platform.
Alan started up his own company “Premier Data Technologies Ltd.” in 2004, creating and maintaining Access-centred solutions for small and medium-sized businesses and departments in larger organisations. Such organisations have included suppliers of communication equipment to North Sea offshore companies, other chemical companies, some charities, a boiler-making company and a land search company. They have included back ends in Azure SQL database, SQL Server and MySQL as well as Access back ends.
Alan is a Christian and has been a Licensed Lay Minister in the Church of England since 2013.
SMOG Access add-in
SMOG stands for Standard Module Object Generation. Alan developed his SMOG add-in in order to make as much use as possible of both compile-time error-checking and Intellisense in Access. The main part enables database objects such as queries and tables, together with their fields and query parameters to be treated as proper database objects and have their names checked using Intellisense and catch spelling errors at compile time rather than when a user is using the application.
SMOG also significantly reduces the amount of code the developer needs to write in such circumstances.
A short example is the replacement of the following code block:
Dim db As DAO.Database Set db = CurrentDb() With db.TableDefs(“tblDemo”) Debug.Print .Fields(“PersonID”) Debug.Print .Fields(“PersonAddress”) End With
… with the following code
With tblDemo Debug.Print .Fields(.PersonID.Name) Debug.Print .Fields(.PersonAddress.Name) End With
Other functionality in SMOG includes Persisted Public Variables (PPVs), i.e. easy and retrieval of storage of variables in both front and back end tables and, again, their handling with compile-time error-checking and Intellisense.
This promises to be a very informative session for all Access developers. Do join us
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IMPORTANT NOTE:
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