Office 2010 Professional Plus Key Use the IsClient

Today’s guest writer is Kerry Westphal the PM for the macro designer and browser logic. Here is Kerry’s introduction on The Access Show on Channel 9: We expect many advanced Access Services applications will have client and web objects—we call these hybrid applications. Hybrid applications are interesting because you can create client forms that leverage the full power of link tables, advanced queries, rich forms/reports, and VBA. See this previous post for more background on Web and client objects. The IsClient() expression allows you to conditionally branch your logic depending on whether the form running inside Access or the browser. In this way you can have one button that runs a different macro based on the context it is called from. This allows you to take advantage of the full power of VBA and macros when the Web form is in the rich client while also using the same form to the browser. It makes application development much easier as you don’t have to create the same form twice (one for the Web and another for the client) to have different logic running based on the environment. I’m going to show three different examples how you can use this functionality in hybrid applications: Open client verses server forms based on context. Call a client macro from a button. Call a VBA function from a button. Open client/server form example Using isClient(),Office Professional Plus 2007 Key, you can open a different form based on whether the form is running in the client or browser. The design experience for Web objects and the compatibility checker allows you to open client and Web forms alike from your Web form. In the following example, you can drill through to a different contact detail form from the button of a contact ID depending on the environment. This is especially useful since the details form on the client takes advantage of functionalities that are unsupported on the Web details form. Call client macro The following example below is an example of extending the 2010 Contacts template to Save a Contact to Outlook using the IsClient() expression to run a client macro from a Web form. The Save to Outlook button allows you to quickly save contacts to your Outlook address book from your Access database. In the OnClick event for the Add Contact from Outlook button,Office Enterprise 2007, check to see if the app is running in the Client and if so,Office 2010 Professional Plus Key, then run the client macro AddFromOutlook that can run the client-only macro SaveToOutlook to open the dialog to save a new Outlook contact. Otherwise,Office 2007, when the button is clicked on the Web, throw a MessageBox saying that the functionality is unsupported. Run VBA from a Web form You can also run VBA from the Web form using the same syntax. The example below extends the Projects 2010 template and adds a task to Outlook every time a new task is added. In the Save & Close button on the Task Details form,Microsoft Office Home And Student 2010, add logic to check if the form is running on the client. If so, then set up TempVars with the values from the form so it can be passed to the VBA function. We will call the VBA function from the onLoad event of a hidden form to get the VBA to add the task to Outlook to run. If the form is running on the Web, this code will not get called. The onClick event on the Save & Close button opens a client form that triggers the RunCode call in the Onload event to run the AddOutlookTask code.
 
Hopefully, this post gives you some ideas about how you can combine Web objects with client objects and call VBA code from inside Web forms if the form is run in the Access client. Enjoy! Edited 1/19/2010 -- This expression is not available in beta 2. It will be available in RTM. Sorry for any confusion. <div