Corporate 401(k) application now flexible to better handle year change

I'll probably want to share about the corporate 401(k) application I developed in further detail in a separate post, but I wanted to point out a much-needed change to the application that I've done. Once again, it's a Microsoft Access database, with VBA that interacts with SQL server using pass-through queries generated at runtime.

I'm sure I'll be discovering other types of applications affected by the year change; this is just one of them. The user requested that the application filter out employees who were terminated prior to the current year so that they do not show up on the report that we send to our 401(k) manager.

As I thought about the need, I realized that there may be a situation in which she'd want to run the report for the previous year, even for a single client. I therefore wanted to provide that sort of flexibility to the system.

The application's main form contains a Calendar control in which the user selects the Start and End Dates. I opted to use the year of the End Date in order to tell the system which employees to include on the report.

For example, if she wanted January 2007, she's select 1/1/07 and 1/31/07 on the form. The system would filter out employees who were terminated before 2007.

To accomplish this, I've added code that will generate the SQL at runtime, since the End Date is now part of the criteria.