About Forms

Forms determine the type of records we want to work with. For example, in case of a library database, there will be two forms: book and author. In case of a company database, we will need correspondingly such forms as product, order, employee and so on.

Therefore, the notion of "Form" is a synonym of the "Record Type". If we compare Brilliant Database with such database as Access, we can say that, creating a new form in the database, we create a new table.

Let us review the "Author" form as an example. It consists of the following elements.

• 1. One or several tabs (Basic Info, Comments, History)
• 2. Simple fields for storing data. In this example, "Author Name" is a text field, "Birthday" is a field for storing dates.
• 3. Relational fields for relating to other forms. In this example, this is the "Books" field storing a list of books written by the author. Data for this field is taken from the records of the "Book" type.
• 4. Mathematical fields. They do not store any data, but display the results of calculations by specified formulas. In this example, these are the total number of books in the "Books" field and the sum of all pages written by the author.
• 5. Fields for storing images and files. In this example, it is the "Image" field in which the author's photo is stored.
• 6. Control buttons (New Book and Print). Buttons can perform simple actions as well as complicated scripts.
• 7. Labels to fields.

A form can have a fixed or alterable size. The form with the alterable size will stretch when the program window is changed, allowing you to use the working space at most, for example:

As you can see, the form consisting of two text fields stretched when the size of the program window was changed. To learn more about alterable forms, see the Layout section.

Forms themselves do not store data; to this end, you should create records on the basis of created forms. To learn more, see the Database Basics section.