How to loop through all Tables in an MS Access DB

Question

I need to read the properties of over 100 tables in an Access 2003 database and write those details - table name, field name, type and size - to a file for further documentation.

I can find nothing from web searches about reading field properties, just field values ...

Can someone please tell me what recordset variables I have to declare (and the syntax) to loop through all of the tables in the DB and extract the field name, type and size from each of them? I will be writing the results to a text file, but I think I can handle that! :)

I'm at a standstill until I can sort this out. It took me a day to document TWO tables manually. Some of the tables have well over 100 fields.

Answer 1

The Database Documenter wizard with these options should give you what you want with the least effort.

If that approach is not satisfactory, you can use custom VBA code to gather the information you want. You can retrieve the names of the tables in your database by looping through the DAO TableDefs collection.

Dim db As DAO.Database
Dim tdf As DAO.TableDef
Set db = CurrentDb
For Each tdf In db.TableDefs
    ' ignore system and temporary tables
    If Not (tdf.name Like "MSys*" Or tdf.name Like "~*") Then
        Debug.Print tdf.name
    End If
Next
Set tdf = Nothing
Set db = Nothing

To get the field details you want, adapt Allen Browne's TableInfo() function ... substitute file write statements for the Debug.Print statements. Note that function uses 2 helper functions, GetDescrip and FieldTypeName, both of which are included in that linked page.

Here is an Immediate window output sample from TableInfo() for a table in my database --- I think it includes the field information you want.

TableInfo "foo"
FIELD NAME    FIELD TYPE    SIZE          DESCRIPTION
==========    ==========    ====          ===========
id            AutoNumber     4            
MyNumber      Long Integer   4            
MyText        Text           255          
bar           Long Integer   4            
==========    ==========    ====          ===========

After you've adapted the function, call it from the For Each tdf loop in the sample above and feed it each tdf.name:

TableInfo tdf.name