Report builder form with AND and OR

[Deutz]

Hi and thanks in advance,

I am using Access 2003

I'm building a form that enables you to specify criteria that translates into an SQL on which a report will be based.

I have a number of combo boxes that are all filled with field names from a table and each combo box has an adjacent text box to enter criteria for the field chosen and you can also specify the operator in another combo.

I want to allow the user to be able to AND or OR the conditions together but I'm not sure how to set it us so that it is not too complicated for the user to understand and for me to code. Rules around bracketing the conditions in the SQL seem to be quite complex. Does anyone have suggestions on how to set something like this up?


thanks

[June7]

This is very difficult because correct parenthesizing is critical when mixing OR and AND operators. Just having user click AND or OR button between criteria is sure to result in a lot of frustration. Access can't know "this AND this OR this" was really intended to be "this AND (this OR this)". You can give the user buttons for each paren and hopefully they understand logical operators well enough to know when to choose them. And if they forget the closing paren - how will you deal with that?

[Deutz]

Thanks June7

That was what I was afraid of. When I started to muck around with bracketing the conditions in code, I could see the complexity involved but thought perhaps there was a simple solution I had not considered. Maybe I should just limit the user to either AND-ing all conditions or OR-ing all conditions.