So I have what is potentially a dumb question regarding MS Access. If I wish to make a form which can be used to populate multiple tables in a relational database, must these other tables be represented by subforms? From what I understand, you could manually change the RecordSource of the main form to include the rare one-to-one relationship, but is there any way such a thing would work for a one-to-many or a many-to-many relationship?
On its face, it seems to me that there's no way this would be possible-- after all, how would Access know how to arrange the multiple elements in a one-to-many relationship on the page?
I'm 90% sure the answer to this is "No, you must use subforms when designing a form which represents a relational model, unless it only contained one-to-one relationships", but I still feel I would be remiss if I didn't double-check this, since I basically jumped headfirst into Access development with no prior experience, and I want to make sure I'm not making an obvious mistake.
No, of course you don't need subforms. You can write all the code to manage loading related records, updating and deleting them, switching records, filtering, etc. yourself.
It's just that subforms are an incredibly convenient tool, ready for you to use.
And if you have to ask the question, you should probably use subforms and not try and re-invent the wheel.
I actually have written code to have about ~100 related records in a single form without using subforms while supporting read and update, because it met a specific goal, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone