Using Other Forms of Security with a Database That Will Be Saved as an MDE File

Saving a database as an MDE file is a good way to protect the code and the design of forms and reports in your application, and it doesn’t require users to log on or require you to create and manage the user accounts and permissions required by user-level security. However, an MDE file doesn’t control how users access your application’s tables, queries, and macros. If you want more control over these database objects, you should establish user-level security before you save your database as an MDE file. User-level security will be preserved in the new MDE file.

However, saving your database as an MDE file prevents all users (including database administrators) from modifying the design of forms, reports, and modules. If this is too restrictive and you require additional control and flexibility in these areas, you shouldn’t save your database as an MDE file — you should establish user-level security instead.

Once you have secured your database with user-level security, if you want to save it as an MDE file, you must meet the following requirements:

• Before starting Microsoft Access, you must use the Workgroup Administrator or the /wrkgrp command-line option to join the workgroup information file that was in use when the database was created.
  
  
• Your user account must have Open/Run and Open Exclusive permissions for the database object.
  
  
• Your user account must have Modify Design or Administer permission for any tables in the database, or you must be the owner of any tables in the database.
  
  
• Your user account must have Read Design permission for all objects in the database.

You can also use a database password to control who can open an MDE database, but you must set the password in the original database before you save it as an MDE file. The database password will be preserved in the new MDE database.

See Also For more information about database passwords, see “Database Passwords” later in this chapter.