How to: Manipulate Multivalued Fields With DAO

Multivalued fields are represented as Recordset objects in DAO. The recordset for a field is a child of the recordset for the table that contains the multivalued field. To instantiate the child recordset, use the Value property of the multivalued field as follows.

Set childRs = rs.<multi-valued field>.Value

The following code example shows how to instantiate the child recordset of the AssignedTo field of the Tasks table.

   Set rs  = db.OpenRecordSet("Tasks") 
   Set childRs = rs.AssignedTo.Value 

The child recordset has the same functionality as any DAO Recordset object.

The following code example shows how to iterate through a parent recordset and its child recordset. The example prints the tasks in the Tasks table along with the people assigned to the tasks to the Immediate window.

Sub BrowseMultiValueField() 
   Dim db As Database 
   Dim rs As Recordset 
   Dim childRS As Recordset 
     
   Set db = CurrentDb() 
     
   ' Open a Recordset for the Tasks table. 
   Set rs = db.OpenRecordset("Tasks") 
   rs.MoveFirst 
     
   Do Until rs.EOF 
      ' Print the name of the task to the Immediate window. 
      Debug.Print rs!TaskName.Value 
         
      ' Open a Recordset for the multivalued field. 
      Set childRS = rs!AssignedTo.Value 
 
         ' Exit the loop if the multivalued field contains no records. 
         Do Until childRS.EOF 
             childRS.MoveFirst 
                     
             ' Loop through the records in the child recordset. 
             Do Until childRS.EOF 
                 ' Print the owner(s) of the task to the Immediate  
                 ' window. 
                 Debug.Print Chr(0), childRS!Value.Value 
                 childRS.MoveNext 
             Loop 
         Loop 
      rs.MoveNext 
   Loop 
End Sub