Autopopulate fields in child form from parent record when opening with command button

[colbywolford]

Hello...I apologize if this question has been covered before; if so, please post a link to the answered thread and I'll look there. As of right now, I have waded through many posts and haven't found my answer--probably because I'm not searching for the correct terms. I uploaded screen shots of the forms I'm asking about.




Here's my setup: I am an editor and am keeping track of all the authors I work with, along with their books that I edit and any events (correspondence, rejections, contract offers, etc.) So, for my question here, I am using my frmAuthors. This form has all the contact data for the author and sfrmBooks that simply lists all the titles the author has submitted for review. I have another form (frmBooks) that lists all the pertinent information regarding specific titles including the ID of the author who wrote it. Now, frmAuthors has a one-to-many relationship with frmBooks because one author can have many titles.

Now, here's the question. I have a command button on frmAuthors named addTitle which opens frmBooks to [acNewRecord]. What I want to do is use that command button, addTitle, to open to the new record and auto-populate the authorID field from the specific frmAuthors parent record. How do I do this?

Thanks,
Colby

[burrina]

Forms!frmAuthors.authorID = Forms!frmAuthors.authorID

FYI: You can always use the wizard and have it build it for you so you can learn.

HTH

[colbywolford]

Where do I enter that? And doesn't one side of the expression have to be Forms!frmBooks.authorID?

I used the wizard to create the command button with the embedded macro to open frmBooks which looks like:

OpenForm
   Form Name frmBooks
   View Form
   Filter Name
   Where Condition = [acNewRecord]
   Data Mode Add
   Window Mode Normal

[burrina]

Yes, I was in a hurry. Forms!frmBooks.authorID = Forms!frmAuthors.authorID
However, we would need to know the field names to get the correct syntax from both forms.

[colbywolford]

Forms!frmBooks.authorID = Forms!frmAuthors.authorID

These field names are correct. However, I still don't know where to input this line.

[burrina]

You could open your form (frmBooks) to a new record by default or by code. Create a command button on your form as you did with the AddTitle or else a new one and then add that code. As I said, I don't use macros.