Appendix D. LESZYNSKI NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR MICROSOFT ACCESS®
Version 99.1, for Access 1.x, 2.x, 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x.
Copyright ® 1996-1999 by Kwery Corporation, All Rights Reserved
—By Stan Leszynski
IN THIS APPENDIX
Developers, by nature, have this love/hate thing about naming conventions. Such standards are often seen as slowing the development process, increasing the size of object names and files, and stifling true programming creativity. And yet, without order, the laws of entropy invariably draw every project toward incoherent spaghetti code and/or spaghetti objects, in Access terminology. Thus, few developers would argue against the need for an ordered approach to development, but they want the system that's least intrusive.
Sorry, but you can't have it both ways! A system that's comprehensive and applied consistently will also by nature be mildly intrusive. If you want to apply a naming convention to your objects, you'll incur a penalty of a few keystrokes every time you type an object name. However, the small pain of extra keystrokes produces a large gain.
Creating naming conventions takes research, effort, and testing. You can take several different approaches when naming objects. For a complete discourse on designing your own naming convention, see Access Expert Solutions by Stan Leszynski, published by Que Corporation.
In this appendix, I detail for you the Leszynski Naming Conventions (LNC), a set of standardized approaches to naming objects during Access development. These naming conventions were born of necessity because some members of my staff spend all day in Access development, year after year. They were also born of a different need—a void that existed in the marketplace due to a lack of consensus about development styles among leading Access developers.
LNC provides common standards for developers who work with multiple Microsoft development tools. Access, Visual Basic, Excel, SQL Server, and other Microsoft products have more in common in their 2000 versions than in any previous iterations. Consequently, this Access style dovetails with the LNC development style for all of Microsoft's application development products, as detailed in the separate product, “Leszynski Naming Conventions for Microsoft Solution Developers.” LNC has been used as the foundation for the code examples in Microsoft's Access and Jet documentation for many years.
I use the terms naming conventions, style, and LNC interchangeably throughout this appendix.