Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 09:32:06 -0500 (CDT)
   From: Mark Jacobson <jacobson@math-cs.cns.uni.edu>
     To: 810-030-01@uni.edu
Subject: Hands-on class Friday morning....

Hi Visual Basic students,

     Friday is our hands-on class.

     We will utilize the data control and connect up to the Movies.mdb
Microsoft Access 97 database (it is on the P: drive in the Jacobson
folder).

     Movies.mdb has two tables:  Quotes and Stars

     Quotes has two fields:   film   and    famousLine

     Stars has four fields:   film, leadActor, leadActress, and Category

     The Quotes table has many more records (rows) than the Stars table.

     There is only ONE entry for each movie in the Stars table,
  but there are often MANY entries for ONE movie in the Quotes table.
  For example, Ghostbusters would probably have 5 or 10 quotes or
  famousLines, but we only need one Ghostbusters entry in the Stars
  table to tell us that Dan Akroyd and Bill Murray are the leadActors,
  and that Sigourney Weaver is the leadActress and that the Category
  of the Ghostbusters movie is Comedy (and not Action/Adventure or Drama).

      Labels, TextBox controls, Image controls, CheckBox controls, etc.
  are called data aware controls:

      Facts about VB
      data aware controls:  Can display information from a field of
                            a record in a database table or recordset.

                            Has the following two properties:

                                 DataSource
                                 DataField

       The VB data control is on your toolbox.

       The properties for the Data control are:

             Connect
             DatabaseName
             RecordsetType
             RecordSource

       The RecordsetType can be Table, Dynaset or Snapshot.
       The RecordSource can be:
                                Table, or
                                SQL statement, or
                                QueryDef object

        SQL stands for Structured Query Language.
                       -          -     -
        Its a universally accepted standard language for asking
        questions (inquiring into the relevant facts) of databases.

        SQL statement to see all the records and fields from the
                      movies.mdb database:

        SELECT * FROM Quotes, Stars WHERE Stars.film = Quotes.film

     -------------------------------------------------------------
     End of review of database concepts from today's class and end
     of preview of database concepts and terms for next 4 classes.
     See you in the lab on Friday.
     --------------------------------------------------------------

     If you would like to take a copy of movies.mdb home with you,
bring a diskette along on Friday.        ----------

     Eventually, we will have an assignment that utlizes movies.mdb.

     P:\jacobson\030\movies.mdb is the entire path to get to it.
       Your computer MIGHT automatically be connecting to P: drive.
       If not, we can set that up again on Friday morning.

     The P: drive letter is for \\Pleiades\courses
                         user id    wrthall
                        password    wright     <----- You won't be
                                                      asked for this
                                                      for P:
     Map Network Drive command is
       invoked by right-clicking on the My Computer Icon
       on your Windows NT desktop in the labs.

     You are basically mapping \\pleiades\courses to the letter P:
                               ------------------               --

     wrthall is the user id or user name you enter.
     -------

     Mark