ForeignName Property

Sets or returns a value that specifies the name of the Field object in a foreign table that corresponds to a field in a primary table for a relationship (Microsoft Jet workspaces only).

Settings and Return Values

The setting or return value is a String data type that evaluates to the name of a Field in the associated TableDef object's Fields collection.

If the Relation object isn't appended to the Database, but the Field is appended to the Relation object, the ForeignName property is read/write. Once the Relation object is appended to the database, the ForeignName property is read-only.

Remarks

Only a Field object that belongs to the Fields collection of a Relation object can support the ForeignName property.

The Name and ForeignName property settings for a Field object specify the names of the corresponding fields in the primary and foreign tables of a relationship. The Table and ForeignTable property settings for a Relation object determine the primary and foreign tables of a relationship.

For example, if you had a list of valid part codes (in a field named PartNo) stored in a ValidParts table, you could establish a relationship with an OrderItem table such that if a part code were entered into the OrderItem table, it would have to already exist in the ValidParts table. If the part code didn't exist in the ValidParts table and you had not set the Attributes property of the Relation object to dbRelationDontEnforce, a trappable error would occur.

In this case, the ValidParts table is the foreign table, so the ForeignTable property of the Relation object would be set to ValidParts and the Table property of the Relation object would be set to OrderItem. The Name and ForeignName properties of the Field object in the Relation object's Fields collection would be set to PartNo.

The following illustration depicts the relation described above.