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Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table

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I am interested in hearing from some of you experienced developers on 
how you design your table driven combo boxes to accommodate user changes 
to the table over time.  Access defaults to storing the key but 
displaying the text value.  That is cool.

If a user subsequently decides to change the combo box list contents, 
they could delete records (in the table feeding the combo box) that they 
no longer need.  Of course this would affect the historical data using 
that combo box selection.  The "proper" way around this is to set the 
relation so that the entry could not be deleted if there are related 
records with its key.  Relational theory!!

You can handle this by setting an "unused" flag in the table, to allow 
the old, no longer needed value, to remain, but not show up in the combo 
box.  Unfortunately, this would prevent the decode action from 
displaying the value.  How do you handle that?

One way of handling that I have used is to have the unused indicator and 
sort the combo records so the unused are at the bottom of the list with 
"NOT CURRENTLY USED" in the display as column 2.  That makes the decode 
work.  And I add logic to produce an error if a user tries to select a 
Not Currently used value for an empty combo box field.

Of course, smart users can get around all this by simply typing the new 
10 values of the combo box, over the existing 10 values, thereby 
destroying the historical data.

I am interested in hearing from experienced developers about how they 
handle this?

bob

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Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table BobAlston <bobalston9@yahoo.com> - 2014-03-12 11:39 -0500
  Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table "Ron Paii" <None@none.com> - 2014-03-12 12:44 -0500
    Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table BobAlston <bobalston9@yahoo.com> - 2014-03-12 16:58 -0500
      Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table Bob Quintal <rquintal@sPAmpatico.ca> - 2014-03-13 10:24 +0000
  Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table Neil <xxx@gmail.com> - 2014-03-12 16:16 -0500
  Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table Hagen Weidlich <durragon@web.de> - 2014-03-14 22:14 +0100
    Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table BobAlston <bobalston9@yahoo.com> - 2014-03-14 21:05 -0500
      Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table "Phil" <phil@stantonfamily.co.uk> - 2014-03-15 09:55 +0000
      Re: Managing changes to combo box contents when values are contained in a table Hagen Weidlich <durragon@web.de> - 2014-03-15 17:14 +0100

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