Access 2003 Maintenance Project - Grouped topics

drachenstern

Ok, the title tells you it's grouped projects, 'cos I don't figure I need to spawn new threads if I come up with other questions later, since they'll all be related. If this was a retarded concept, tell me. And to get the relevant stuff out of the way, yes, I'm "reworking" an existing app that has about 8 years of data in it, and so I can't make radical changes. My biggest problem at the moment is that the database is in no way relational, nor normalized (ok, it's partially normalized, but ... yeah, you've all been here). All the relational logic is handled in the front end, which wouldn't be a problem, except that whole bit about uncommitted changes on crash, etc. The reason for the rework in the first place is they want to work in some new data points, and take out some of the illogical gotchas that are really hindering performance. (like, if the app crashes before commit, and reloading the form wipes the temporary tables, etc).

So the first thought was this:

I've personally never used temporary tables for anything more than scratch, like if I'm merging tables or something, and I want to know it works well. (Eventually I would like to transition this to a web based project, but nobody here quite groks the concept of web-interface for a database.) So, is the use of temporary tables just so normal a concept and I'm not used to it, or is this something that they did that was definitely braindead? I'll give a quaint example, that doesn't match what I just wrote, but is an extension of what they're doing. If you want to run a report, they copy all the data from the pertinent backend tables into a local table (whose structure doesn't mimic the first table, this little gotcha exists on every temporary table bar none that I've found) and then run a report off that table.
Ok, I grok the concept of speed, but this is not a multi-million user database. We're talking maybe 15 instances open at any one time. But is there that big of a speedup in "copying all records that you want into a local disk, then formatting from that read into what you see on screen"? I would think not.

They made every single form popup+modal, which I think is a terrible idea. Any reasons why I should use popup+modal on anything that's not a dire-emergency handle-this-now sort of situation?

Ok, now that we've established whether I am totally naive or not, the next question is in a totally other direction. But I wanted the "vets" to give me some idea of if that's normal...

Next question(s):

I'm using a vba class module: Pastebin'd (for one month) http://pastebin.com/d590ce8f8 and I'm testing it with this code:

Public Sub testdecl()
    app.LastMonth
    Debug.Print app.startDate
    Debug.Print app.endDate
    app.ThisMonth
    Debug.Print app.startDate
    Debug.Print app.endDate
    app.Reset
    Debug.Print app.startDate
    Debug.Print app.endDate
End Sub

Is there a way that I'm not grokking in VBA to have "debug.print app" show all the associated elements, without me having to call each one? Or would that be better declared by making a new app.DebugPrint and have that just list each one? (something tells me I just answered my own question, but I'm trying for code brevity and readability, and if there's an already existing solution, I would prefer to not reinvent the wheel, ya know?)

EDIT: Fixed a grammatical error in my comments...