Hi,

For my dissertation I am looking into customising software for a dental laboratory. I have used Access to create my tables, forms and reports.

I have four separate Access files; Patient and Employee Information, Booking Appointments, Making Payments, Storing Cases and Treatments.

I now want to combine all of these together so when a user needs to use the software they can choose from the above files (Patient and Employee Information, Booking Appointments, Making Payments, Storing Cases and Treatments) as to what they want to be included in their final software package. Example: some dental laboratories might not have or need a computerised booking system so might not choose to include this in there "customised" system.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can do this?!

I hope the above makes sense.
Thank you

Example: some dental laboratories might not have or need a computerised booking system so might not choose to include this in there "customised" system.

Then the problem is binary. That is, they can either use your system or not.

Supposing they all have need and systems to run it and if you are trying to let them 'select' which pieces of your database to 'customise' it a simplified approach would be (in my opinion) something like the following.

Module 1: Patient and Employee Information & Booking Appointments
Module 2: Patient and Employee Information & Making Payments
Module 3: Patient and Employee Information & Storing Cases and Treatments

I am makind the assumption that the Pat & Emp tables are required or else you wouldn't know who to book for an appointment, or who made a payment, etc.

Suppose you had another table and called it "Modules". In this you could store the module numbers and some method of marking which modules were 'licensed' or not.

Then on your menu screen, you could perform a DLookup for the modules table and use an if-then to show (or not) the relevant buttons for the forms.

Now, if your definition of 'customization' is to let them choose certain fields in the tables or what-have-you then you will need to create set-up wizards when the users first open the database. By using coding, you can create these wizards to create custom tables, forms, etc. Alot of coding and beyond the scope of this post but since you are working on a dissertation I assume you are going for PHD and used to researching and can find copious information in this regard.

Good luck and hope that helps,

-dK

is your system fully designed and implemented already or are you still working on it.

if it isnt finished yet, i would leave all this until its completed - this is a relatively easy thing to do in a simple way. just use a control table to manage what users can do

its hard to do in a real world situation though, if you are trying to make a system that REALLY can restrict users, then the users themselves cant be able to access the methods to affect this.