Using VBA to Filter Report Results

Earlier this week I was asked how to filter the results of a report using a criteria selected from three Combo Boxes on a search form.  You can see Marwa's question posted on my Access Tutorial Facebook Page (Tuesday 10th January 2012).  The solution I suggested involved creating a Parameter Query with three separate criteria referencing the values contained in the Combo Boxes on the Search Form.  You can see the full response I gave in my comment below her question.

By co-incidence I have also been working on a similar task in my work as an Access Developer.  One of the projects I am currently working on is a Journal Database which uses descriptive tags to categorise journal entries.   So, for example, if users made an entry about their progress learning Microsoft Access, they might use tags such as  "Database Development", "Reports", and "Filters" to categorise their entry.

I wanted to create an quick way for users to search their journal by tag name, so that all records categorised by a given tag may be extracted and displayed in a report.  To do this I created a really basic search form that consisted of just one unbound Combo Box.

The ROW SOURCE for the Combo Box is a table containing all of the tag names used in the database.  The idea is that the user selects a tag from the drop down list, thereby triggering a block of VBA code in order to open the report filtered by the selected tag name.  The screen shot below shows the report filtered by the tag name "ADO.Net":

The underlying table structure for this report is based on a query with
three tables from a many to many relationship.  There is a table for the Entries, and a
separate table for Tags.  There is also a junction table to store each instance of
a tag used in any particular Entry.  As such a journal entry can be related to
many tags records, and any tag record can be related to many Entries.

So how does this work?  When the user selects a tag name from the drop down list, Access fires the Combo Box AFTER UPDATE event.  This in turn executes the followingVBA code that I wrote for this event:

Private Sub comTag_AfterUpdate()

    Dim varSQLWhere As String
    varSQLWhere = "tagId = '" & Me!comTag & "'"
    DoCmd.Close acForm, Me.Name
    DoCmd.OpenReport "rptTagSearch", acViewReport, , varSQLWhere

End Sub
NB for sake of clarity, I have removed all code related to error handling. 

The code begins by defining a string type variable called varSQLWhere - this is going to contain the code for an SQL WHERE clause (minus the WHERE keyword).  Next I set the value of this variable to "tagId = '" & Me!comTag & "'".  TagId is the name of the primary key of the table containing all of the tag names.  In fact, tblTags only contains this one field.  Me!comTag is a reference to the name of the Combo box used on the search form.  Note the manner in which it has been concatenated into the string variable. Due to fact that the value contained in the combo box is itself a string, I have had to build two single quotation makes into the varSQLWhere string.  So for example, if the user had selected the tag name 'Visual Studio' in the Combo Box, the contents of the string variable would be "tagId = 'Visual Studio'" .

The next line of code closes the search form so it does not get in the way when the form opens.

The penultimate line of code is the DoCmd.OpenReport method.  This not only opens our report, but also passes our varSQLWhere variable as one of the method's parameters (the WhereCondition). When this is passed, only records matching our WhereCondition are displayed in the report results.  As such, our report effectively filters our report results by the tag name selected by the user in the search form combo box.

It's not too difficult to apply this type of solution to the application that Marwa is building. The only real difference is that her Database search form consists of three combo boxes.  This means that she would also need to use a  Command Button ONCLICK event to start the search rather than relying on one of the Combo Box AfterUpdate Events.  Then she would need to construct the varSQLWhere variable from all three combo box values.  This would look something like:

varSQLWhere = "fld1 = '" & Me!Combo1 & "' AND fld2 = '" & Me!Combo2 & "' AND fld3 = '" & Me!Combo3 & "'"

So its slightly more complicated, but the same principles apply.