2. Creating an Access Web App
Creating Access web applications should
now be possible given the properly configured Office 365 or on-premise
environment. Consider the following scenario for the first Access web
app: The consulting arm of the TailSpin Toy company needs to track its
various employees for their physical locations and client consulting
engagements. Naturally this application should be available via the
company’s intranet, which is hosted by Office 365. To create an
application that meets the TailSpin Toys requirements, follow the
following steps:
2.1 Creating the Basic Application
The first thing to do is to create the
initial shell of the application and test it to make sure that the
application can be deployed successfully and that it possesses the
expected user experience. The following six steps walk you through the
creation of an app up to the point of data entry and should take
approximately 60 seconds to complete.
1. Open Access and choose Custom web app.
2. Enter a name such as TailSpin Toys Consultant Tracker and the web location for your app such as http://tailspintoys.com/sites/staffing and choose Create.
3. Now that the application has been created, add some initial tables by searching for relevant templates by typing Employee into the What Would You Like to Track? search box. Then press Enter.
4. Select the Employees table template.
5. Search for and add the Clients table and the Projects table.
6. Before
continuing to add any additional tables, take the time to explore the
newly added tables and associated views in the browser by clicking the
Launch App button on the Ribbon:
1. Notice that the Tile Pane contains entries for the Employees, Clients, Projects, and Tasks tables, as shown in Figure 1. The Tasks table was added with the Projects table as part of the default schema associated with the Projects noun.
2. Notice that each table has three default views: List, Datasheet, and a By Group or By Status view.
3. Perform a
bit of data entry on the Projects table and notice the built-in
relationship between the Projects, Employees, and Clients table. As a
name is typed into the Owner or Customer field, an auto-complete
functionality attempts to find the relevant record or offers the user
the ability to create a new record if a matching record can’t be found.
Create a project, an employee, and a client. Each table except Tasks
now contains data in each view.
