Appendix B. Naming Conventions for Access Objects and Variables

By Stan Leszynski, Leszynski Company, Inc., and Kwery Corporation

This appendix describes 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 the staff of my firm 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.

I am grateful to Greg Reddick, a former contractor with one of my companies, for jointly authoring the Access 1.x and 2.0 versions of our Access naming conventions with me (referred to as L/R for Leszynski/Reddick). The L/R conventions were distributed broadly, with more than 500,000 copies in print, and have become the most widely used such conventions in the Access community. During the last few years, we have received feedback about L/R from hundreds of developers and companies, and have tried to accommodate some of their input—as well as our ongoing experiences—into LNC.

LNC improves on the previous Access style by considering developers who work with multiple Microsoft development tools. Access, Visual Basic, Excel, and other Microsoft products such as Visual Basic Script (VBScript) have more in common in their Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 versions than in any previous iterations. Consequently, this Access style dovetails with the LNC development style for all of VBA and FoxPro.

The prefixes, tags, and qualifiers in the naming conventions described in this appendix that are derived from L/R are underlined. If you are a user of the Access 2.0 version of L/R, new additions for you to note are those conventions that are not underlined. I use the terms naming conventions, style, and LNC interchangeably throughout this appendix.