Property Object

Description

A Property object represents a built-in or user-defined characteristic of a data access object.

Remarks

Every data access object contains a Properties collection, which has certain built-in Property objects. These Property objects (which are often just called properties) uniquely characterize that instance of the object. You specify built-in properties when you create a new data access object. You can set the properties of some existing data access objects using an assignment statement.

The Property object also has four built-in properties:

The Name property, a String that uniquely identifies the property.
The Type property, an Integer that specifies the property data type.
The Value property, a Variant that contains the property setting.
The Inherited property, a Boolean flag that indicates whether the property is inherited from another object. For example, a Field object in a Fields collection of a Recordset object can inherit properties from the underlying TableDef or QueryDef object.

In addition to these built-in properties, you can create and add your own user-defined properties to these objects:

Database, Index, QueryDef, and TableDef objects
Field objects in Fields collections of QueryDef and TableDef objects

To add a user-defined property, use the CreateProperty method to create a Property object with a unique Name property setting. Set the Type and Value properties of the new Property object, and then append it to the Properties collection of the appropriate object. The object to which you are adding the user-defined property must already be saved to disk (that is, it must be appended to a collection).

You can delete user-defined properties from the Properties collection, but you can't delete built-in properties.

Note

A user-defined property (Property object) is associated only with the specific instance of the object whose Properties collection you append it to. The property isn't defined for all instances of objects of the selected type.

You can use the Properties collection of an object to enumerate the object's built-in and user-defined properties. You don't need to know beforehand exactly which properties exist or what their characteristics (Name and Type properties) are to manipulate them. However, if you try to read a write-only property (such as the Password property of a Workspace object), an error occurs.

You can refer to an existing built-in or user-defined property by its Name property setting using this syntax:

object.Properties("name")

For a built-in property, you can also use this syntax:

object.name

You can also reference properties by their ordinal position using this syntax, which refers to the first member of the Properties collection:

object.Properties(0)

A user-defined property differs from a built-in property of a data access object in the following ways:

You must refer to a user-defined property using the full Properties("name") syntax.
If you haven't previously set the property's value, you need to create it first using the CreateProperty method.

Properties

Inherited Property, Name Property, Type Property, Value Property.