Referencing a Table

In most cases, before performing an operation on a table, you will need to indicate what table you are referring to. This is usually easy to the user who can visually see the table. As for you as the database developer, you can first programmatically get a reference to the table you intend to work on.

If a table exists already, to get a reference to it using the Microsoft Access Object library, first declare a variable of type Object. Then, assign the TableDefs property of the current database to the variable. TableDefs is a collection of the tables of the current database. To specify what table you are referring to, you can pass its name, as a string to the TableDefs indexed property. Here is an example:

Private Sub cmdGetReference_Click()
    Dim curDatabase As Object
    Dim tblStudents As Object

    ' Get a reference to the current database
    Set curDatabase = CurrentDb
    ' Get a reference to a table named Students
    Set tblStudents = curDatabase.TableDefs("Students")
    
    . . . Use the table here

    Set tblStudents = Nothing
End Sub

Instead of using its name, you can also pass the numeric index of the table to the TableDefs property.