About customizing your application's environment with user profiles and run-time options

An Access user profile is a special set of Microsoft Windows registry keys that you can create to override standard Access and Microsoft Jet database engine settings, and to specify additional run-time options. You then use the /profile command-line option to specify this Access user profile when you start your application.

Access provides database properties and startup options to meet most of your customization needs. However, if you're an application developer, you might want to take advantage of the added benefits of an Access user profile to customize your application's environment. For example, you can use an Access user profile to:

• Prevent standard Access settings that users might modify in their database properties and startup options from conflicting with your application needs.
• Ensure that when you distribute your applications, other programs that use Jet do not override custom settings.
• Test your application under different configurations.

Note  A user profile that you use to start Access from the command line is not the same thing as a user profile that's defined for logging on to the operating system. An Access user profile applies only to Access, and only when you start Access from the command line. A user profile defined for the operating system applies to every application on the operating system and is used to maintain system data for individual users.

You can add run-time options to your Access user profile to further customize your application's environment. For example, you can:

• Replace the Access title bar with an application-specific title.
• Replace the Access icon with an application-specific icon.
• Specify an application-specific Help file as the default Help file.
• Add a splash screen to uniquely identify and announce your application when it starts.

You can use the acSysCmdProfile constant in the action argument of the SysCmd method to determine whether your application has properly loaded your Access user profile (for example, your users might accidentally open your application through Windows Explorer and bypass the /profile command-line option).

You can also use the Data Access Object (DAO) SetOption method of the DBEngine object to dynamically modify Jet registry values at run time for a single session, without permanently modifying the values in the Microsoft Windows registry.