As you know, you get a developer license for single purchase price. There is no any “single”, “per-user” or “server” complicated licensing stuff. We tried to make things as simple as possible.

Once you get AccessImagine registered, you are an developer. Every Access database you create with AccessImagine holds your mark, and appears nice & registered to every user.

The main plot is:

You don’t need to activate AccessImagine on every user’s computer.
Its enough to activate it on PC you are developing the database.

There is one remark to this. When you have developed a database with shareware (non-activated) AccessImagine, and activated it recently, you need to “touch” every AccessImagine component on every form to update it status. “Touch” mean some manipulation like “open form in design view, move component or change some it property back and forth, than close form with saving changes”.

Sure, this topic is not so easy to understand. Please ask questions and we’ll explain better.

Site log analysis indicated, that a lot of people come here to find some answers about continuous forms. So, we decided to create this FAQ, to answer all questions you may have about that continuous forms.

Introduction

Microsoft Access continuous form is a special form type, when entire form design is repeated for each record of the data source. It gives you ability to make something different to usual “table-view” approach, hovever you are still limited to “striped” design.

Core problem

Access doesn’t create separate form object for each record. It just makes one form to draw several times with different data. This leads to following limitations:

• Any changes to form controls or properties thru VBA affects appearence of all the records
• Event handlers you suppose to be executed for every record, execute only for the first one
• It is restricted to place ActiveX controls on continuous form

There is no ways to bypass this limitations directly. Remark: this limitations doesn’t apply to header and footer of the form – because it is not dublicated.

FAQ

Once we made thru basics, lets answer the questions. If you have question not being answered here, don’t hesistate to ask it at the bottom of the page.

How can I make controls to look different in different records?

The only way is to use Format->Conditional Formatting feature. In Access 2007 you can put right mouse button on the row title in table view to reach it. Sure, its limited alot, but there is no much choice here.

How can I show pictures from database?

All the methods that utilize regular data-bound controls are valid. You can use Bound Object Frame, in Access 2007 – Attachments and Image controls. However, you can’t use any VBA scripting with em.

How can I show some conditional data or pictures?

The only way to achieve this is to build custom queries, that perform checks and calculations you need and prepare data to show.

How can I show pictures, that are stored externally?

In Access 2007 there is an improvement to regular Image control. It will display image from file, if you bind it to the field or expression that provides image path and filename. This works in continuous forms too.

In pre-2007 versions of Access you need to have picture previews saved in your database as OLE data type. AccessImagine control handles their creation and maintaining easily.

How can I do something, that Access limitations doesn’t allow me to do?

If there is no tricks to save the situation, people usually mimic continuous forms, creating a form that displays several records at once with paging buttons. There are 2 downsides of this approach. First – it requires a lot of VBA coding. Second – you loose all the built-in features users can utilize to any Access form – sorting, search and filters.

Try to avoid this path until you have some time to waste.

Not found an answer you need? Post a question at the bottom!

Download this tiny database to test extended imaging capabilities.

Techniques demonstrated here:

• thumbnails generation
• continuous forms with pictures
• on-demand AccessImagine installation
• instructing user how to turn active content on

This article shows the proper way of image handling in continuous forms with the help of AccessImagine control. If you are looking for answers on some common questions about continuous forms, check the Continuous forms FAQ. Read more »

You often need users to provide some pictures to your application – even if it is not database-driven. Its quite time-consuming task to develop a good functionality for end users – and you leave it at some basical stage (like “press-a-button-and-find-the-picture-you-want-to-add-at-your-computer-in-BMP-format-and-if-you-don’t-have-one-then-create-it-before”). Surely it affects the whole application usability significantly.

With the help of AccessImagine you can add rich user experience never seen before when one submits some picture(s) to application. Just take a look at the action video (if you havn’t seen it before).

So, if you use some of the .NET programming languages – Visual Basic, C++ or C# – you can add such a behaivior to your app in few clicks. Read more »

This is a video version of Getting started with AccessImagine tutorial.
Read more »

In nice applications usage of thumbnails (or previews) of your pictures is a necessity. It speeds up things when you use small pictures to show small pictures instead of shrinking big pictures everytime.

Thumbnails generation in Microsoft Access can be done with one  line of code using AccessImagine.

Read more »

They say its better not to put images to database. Maybe its rumors, maybe not. Anyway, large amount of images makes DB fat and thus stresses database application. Its not easy to handle fat beings, huh.

Thanks to AccessImagine, all you need to specify is where to keep images – and it will do all the job by itself. If you try to code external storage by your own, you will have hard times. Not worth getting in trouble with.

Read more »

Usually you don’t need that 5Mb images users try to save in a database:

- Hey, I need a small contact picture, I don’t need to make a poster of it!
- How come this picture are so big if my camera is so small ? …

There is a simple way to tell AccessImagine what size of images you need – and it will donwsample violators.

Read more »