@DakotaRidge's rationale is to provide his users with hardwired forms, customized for a single specific purpose, e.g. a form for food bought at Wamart, another form for recalled food, another form for recalled medications, and so on. He doesn't want a generic form for all cases, all vendors, all item categories because he thinks his end users are going to get confused selecting values from cascading combo boxes. Those require vba code and he doesn't do code, so he relies on limited macros and hardwired forms as a workaround because that's all he knows how to work with. Same reason he uses mvf's, because users can select multiple values from one dropdown list. He prioritizes the UI and UX not knowing he can merge all those hardwired forms and use parameterized queries that leverage normalized tables. He wants to provide for all possible use case scenarios, so that combined with his hardwired forms yields thousands of tables, hardcoded queries, and so forth. go figure... I have seen other people's apps designed like this, including his proposals mgmt app that surpassed 2GB quite a while ago. I cannot visualize how long it would take for me to bloat a db to 2GB. I guess it can happen quickly if you embed images in 4,000+ forms, but just building that many forms would take me an eternity! How does one efficiently navigate to a specific form with so many of them? Stacked submenus? Treeview menus? There are very few valid reasons for building denormalized apps. A Decision Support System performs better with denormalized aggregate tables, and some normalized apps that have too many joined tables that requires hairy stacked queries, so you partially denormalize some data to improve performance and simplify queries.
When he gets to the point where he has an entire data warehouse built that warrants ETL jobs loading denormalized data for reporting purposes, he is welcome to let us know. That's about where it's appropriate.
I'm sure Richard's not using MVF's and denormalized design.
Can you post a link to Richard's grand project?
