I am entirely new at Visual Basic 2008 Express, and currently the only thing I have learned so far is the Designer portion of the program. I am a member of a fire/ambulance department and we are trying to develope a program for our ambulance to record calls. Using the designer in Visual Basic 2008 express edition, I devloped this nice looking form [screenshot attached].
This is what I need help with.
1. My form does nothing, obviously because it is not attached to a database. I know very little about databases, I know that you need to make tables which are what hold you data, but I have now idea how to generate tables from the form fields I have created.
2. I need to make the form Submit and Print buttons work. I I used the powerpack print form feature but all that does is print a screenshot of the form, and I need it to print a report of the forms entries.
3. I need to form fields to be searchable, so if I types in the run number or ePCR number it would bring up all the information for that submission.
If anyone would like to volunteer some time to answer some of my questions and help out this clueless fireman, it would be much appreciated.
For your database, I don't know how many calls you would get a week/month/year so it would be hard to say for sure, but if you are limited on funds, MS Access would be cheapest way to go.
Access will allow you to store your data and create reports to display the data that you want to print.
If you use another DBMS like MySQL or SQL Server Express(I believe that comes as part of the Express package, if not should be downloadable separately), you may need separate reporting software like Crystal Reports.
I would not recommend using MS Access for this.... However SQL Server Express is freely downloadable from MS website (along with a GUI front end for it). The largest issue would be with the size of the expected database, SQL Express can hold no more then 4 GB of data. As to MySQL can't say anything about it, I tried it a number of years ago found it lacking in things I needed and haven't looked at it since.
As for design of the database that should not be based off your form, but on the needs you will have. The design of the tables should be based on keeping redundancy of data out of the tables (so personnel would have a table by it self, the table might hold an Identity as the PK of the table or a GUID as the PK. The table would also hold personnel name (break it up first and last), addresses (again break it up)
Maybe another table for what shifts a person works (days, time of day) ......
and so on.
Last edited by si_the_geek; Apr 5th, 2010 at 01:28 PM.
Reason: corrected a "rude" typo
There are many things that you need to do as part of this process, and I recommend dealing with each one separately... it would be best to use this thread as just a general overview where you pick which database system and reporting option to use, and then create other threads as needed for the further steps.
There is a general guide to picking the database system to use in the "General" section of our Database Development FAQs/Tutorials(at the top of the Database Development forum), but I suspect that the suggestion of SQL Server Express is likely to be best for you.
In terms of the table design, I recommend reading the article on Normalisation in the "Design" section of those FAQs (which is the kind of things Gary mentioned), and then creating a new thread in our Database Development forum if you want help with it.
Originally Posted by osulliga
if you are limited on funds, MS Access would be cheapest way to go.
There are very few cases where that is true - in most cases it is one of the most expensive options, unless you happen to already have Access (as it costs extra, most people don't have it).
If you are just using it as a data store, you need to have at least one copy of Access to create the database.
If you are also using the non-database features (such as reports), each user needs Access installed too.
With SQL Server Express etc all of the software you need is completely free, and the databases have more generous limits than you get with Access.
If you need reporting tools (such as Crystal Reports etc), the cost of that could well be cheaper than buying Access for all your users.
By the way, if you decide to download SQL Server Express, there are three variations depending on which features you want. Since they are all free, get the one with the most features, but at the very least, make sure you get one of the two with Management Studio, as the other one lacks any easy means to create DBs, and adding in Managment Studio afterwards, while theoretically possible, has proven to be difficult.
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Originally Posted by osulliga
