Question regarding required fields, is there a way to stop the following message from appearing “The field ‘Lastname’ cannot contain a Null value because the Required property for this field is set to True. Enter a value in this field.”, when the change made ends up with no results? For example in a sub form a user proceeds to enter in a last name “Smith” then back spaces out the result to a blank field, now the user wants to change to another tab (i.e. another sub form) and that’s when the message screen comes up. Is there a way to stop the error message from coming up if no actual change has been made without hitting the ESC key? Any suggestions?

Yes, but it requires more coding.

You need to allow nulls (Required = No) in the last name field, but then do data validation on all your forms.

The problem with this is that you will also need to remove the close buttons etc from your forms to prevent the user from closing the form or moving to the next record without using your data validation triggering events.

If you remove the record selector and form close buttons, you can add code that checks for the last name data and prompts the user to enter a value and exits the close of next record or save record event. This is dicey when you are referencing subform values as well.

So the answer is yes and no. Who do you want to inconvenience, and how much?

I don't think there is a way to get rid of the error message you speak of without changing the required property since it is handled at a lower level in the object model.

mmcdonal

I guess the simplest approach to this would be to set the Required property to no and use the * symbol in the label to specify the fields you want the user to enter and leave it to them i.e. Last name: Smith * (place outside the entry field). (* = required) Thank you for the suggestion.