DAO is a hierarchy of objects and collections of objects. As shown in Figure 2.1, each table, field, index, query, and so on is represented by objects organized into collections. Each object has a set of properties that define its characteristics and one or more methods that you use to perform various operations on the object. This section introduces the DAO object hierarchy and provides information about each type of object it contains.
Figure 2.1 Collections, objects, properties, and methods
In the DAO object hierarchy, all objects are contained in a single DBEngine object. Figure 2.2 shows the DAO object hierarchy for Microsoft Jet workspaces.
Note DAO version 3.5 includes a second object hierarchy — the ODBCDirect object hierarchy. You can use the ODBCDirect object hierarchy to work with ODBC data sources without going through the Jet database engine. The objects in the ODBCDirect object hierarchy are not shown in Figure 2.2. For information about ODBCDirect and to see the ODBCDirect object hierarchy, see Chapter 9, “Developing Client/Server Applications.”
Figure 2.2 The DAO object hierarchy for Microsoft Jet workspaces
