New FE or control UI with VBA? (1 Viewer)

[lution]

Question for the crowd: I have a a split database that's in use. Several of my customers have asked me for a limited version of the front-end that has a limited menu and only a couple of the forms available to users. All the data is read-only in for these users. I'm trying to decide if I should dynamically edit the menu's/forms to limit the view based on the user's access level or if I should go ahead and clone the FE and take out all the "extra" stuff.

Any thoughts on pro's & con's and how you'd do it? Doing it dynamically means only changing the forms once but I'd need logic in each one to determine if the form is supposed to be displayed and if it is read-only. If I clone then if a user changes their privileges, they'd need to swap the versions of the product (which would be good since there is a bigger fee for the full-access version).

Thanks

 

[MarkK]

I think it depends on how different the features are. If the new features would basically have the same user interface elements with slightly different access levels or functions then customize the UI by user.
But I might write a new FE for different departments or where the functionality is completely different.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

personally, i would try and keep one system, with switches to deactivate some functionality. if you CAN do this, it makes it easier to develop forward - and when someone decides they want more functionality, you only have 1 dbs to maintain.

 

[boblarson]

personally, i would try and keep one system, with switches to deactivate some functionality. if you CAN do this, it makes it easier to develop forward - and when someone decides they want more functionality, you only have 1 dbs to maintain.

I second that...

 

[lution]

Thanks guys. Couple other considerations:

- These extra users are read-only so I'd want to open the database read-only. Guess I can tweak the forms so they open the tables read-only

- Was thinking since the users only have access to 1 form, that I'd add another custom ribbon but I haven't found a way to dynamically change the default ribbon for the database (also need to get rid of a lot of the default commands like print which i know how to do). Guess I can leave all the other ribbon commands there but thought I'd make it easy on them.

 

[boblarson]

Thanks guys. Couple other considerations:

- These extra users are read-only so I'd want to open the database read-only. Guess I can tweak the forms so they open the tables read-only

Just set the form's AllowEdits, AllowDeletions and AllowAdditions properties to FALSE with code for that user type.

- Was thinking since the users only have access to 1 form, that I'd add another custom ribbon but I haven't found a way to dynamically change the default ribbon for the database (also need to get rid of a lot of the default commands like print which i know how to do). Guess I can leave all the other ribbon commands there but thought I'd make it easy on them.

I don't know if you can dynamically change the DEFAULT Ribbon, but you wouldn't need to. You can assign a particular Ribbon to a form so you can have your custom ones available. For getting rid of the Default Ribbon, you set your form's ribbons to start from scratch (see the tutorials on the Ribbon here).

 

[Dairy Farmer]

the users only have access to 1 form

Make a new FE if it is only one form.

 

[boblarson]

Make a new FE if it is only one form.

No need and it creates extra maintenance problems.

 

[lution]

Thanks for the feedback guys. My original thinking was that it would be better to have 2 different front ends, if for no other reason, to get all that "extra" code out. After playing with it both ways, Bob was correct. I spent a couple hours last weekend trying to only get what was absolutely necessary in the new FE and wasn't even close to being done. Today I spent maybe two hours adding the custom ribbon and a bunch of if statements and its done.

In addition to saving me time duplicating/removing code, it saved me having to write a new setup application. My customers have to get load keys for every machine they load the FE on and I'm going to have to do some work to change that around a little so my application knows which one is loaded. As it stands right now, they could tell me they want a read-only version, and then change the user's permissions in the system to get everything.

-Lution