[AccessD] Drilling down with ADO

One of the things that has always fascinated me is the concept (never
actually implemented) of using DAO to "drill down" into a bound control to
discover what field and table the object is bound to, and after that
"drilling down" into that field in the table to discover what datatype the
control is displaying.  For example, a control could be bound to a field
whose datatype is date.  You could have a rule that "all dates should be
displayed in YYYMMDD format", but in the future the powers that be could
decide that they wanted DDMMYYYY.  If you have ever designed a large system,
or worse inherited one, you can probably relate to trying to find all such
controls in a large system and changing the format from whatever the
developer applied (or didn't apply) to a standard format.  Some controls may
have a format in the format property, others may depend on format strings
applied to the field at the database level.  Others may have no specific
format, relying on the windows default.

I believe that it is possible to perform this function with DAO but is it
possible with ADO?  To my knowledge only ADO can access properties of
objects stored in a database container (a form or control).  As for fields
in tables, I know that DAO can do so, I have no idea whether ADO could
return the data type of a field in a table.  Is this possible?

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

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