Microsoft Access VBA Naming Conventions
General
As novice developer you usually define names for constants, variables and methods as they occur; you look at a problem, think of a function, add some parameters and that's it.
After a few years of coding—especially once you are forced to refactor some of your legacy coding—you will realize that the code is hard to read; it somehow feels "inconsistent".
Also during normal development you will notice that you keep stumpling upon the same issues again and again: you're trying to access variables, which are not accessible, you try to use a variable for a text value and run in to an error as it has been defined for numbers: the list of little annoyances which are implied when not sticking to consistent conventions is long—add your favourite annoyance here.
The naming conventions depend on the language you are using, but for VBA it is common conviction to use either the Reddick VBA Naming Conventions or the Leszynski VBA Naming Conventions, which are both versions of the Hungarian notation.
The main idea is to prefix everything with a tag which indicates the type of the variable.
Tag
A tag is a usually three letter long lowercase mnemonic for the variable type. As there is not a tag for every kind of variable, you sometimes need to "invent" a tag of your own. The usual steps for finding an appropriate tag are:
- Take the name of the object type
- Remove all vowels from the name
- Take the first three letters
As soon as you found a tag you should consider the following questions too:
- Is the tag already taken by another object type?
- Does it phonetically sound like the object type?
If you should answer one of these questions with "yes", you should adjust the tag name accordingly.
Data Type
| Data Type | Tag |
|---|---|
| Boolean | bln |
| Integer | int |
| Long | lng |
| Single | sng |
| Double | dbl |
| Currency | cur |
| String | str |
| Variant | var |
| Type | typ |