[AccessD] Naming Conventions

The historian in me chafes at the bit, John. Hungarian notation began with Charles Simonyi, IIRC. But as I wrote previously, the particular convention does not matter, so long as one adheres to it. I prefer Hungarian postfix for one simple reason: signal to noise ratio. With the Reddick/Leszynski convention, the first n letters are noise, IMO, not signal, so I use these identifiers as suffixes not prefixes:

clsMyClass --> MyClass_cls

This convention sorts everything (IMO) much more intelligently than the classic H-prefix notation. I want everything related to "Customer" to begin with "Customer", not "cls" or "frm" or "rpt" etc. Perhaps this is an indication of my advanced age. I like to see everything related to "Customer" sorted alphabetically under "Customer", not distributed beneath a dozen or more prefixes. Personal preference, let's call it, but if you're working for me you'll use suffixes, and if I'm working for you, I'll use prefixes. So be it.

Incidentally, I do similar things when naming queries in Access. (I never use SELECT statements as either record source or row source -- I name every query.) For example, Customer_qs, Customer_qa, Customer_qd and Customer_qu. I don't think that I even need to spell out what they do, the convention is so obvious, and it has the added advantage of intelligent sorting.
 
Arthur Fuller
Technical Writer, Data Modeler, SQL Sensei
Artful Databases Organization
www.artfulsoftware.com




----- Original Message ----
From: John Bartow <john at winhaven.net>
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving <accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 10:35:38 AM
Subject: Re: [AccessD] Naming Conventions


Hi Barb,
Reddick (or some derivation of it) is one that is commonly used in Access.
If you have the Access Developer's Handbook (ADH) there's a listing of the
conventions for Access in the appendix Reddick also keeps it up to date via
the web:
http://www.xoc.net/standards/default.asp

It was based on the Hungarian Conventions and was originally put together by
Reddick and Leszynski.

I standardized on it a couple of years ago.

Another convention:
http://www.georgehernandez.com/h/xDatabases/aaIntro/DBNamingConventions.htm#
All%20Database%20Objects

HTH
John