Cascading ComboBoxes in Access

Question

I have created a form with two combo boxes. The value that is selected in the first combo box should determine a selected range of values that appear in the second combo box (typical cascading combo box situation).
The first combo box is to select the business operation. The second combo box gives the teams within the business operation. I built a table with a list of business operations called TblBusinessOperation (Sales, Marketing, Risk as fields) and then a table
for each business operation with lists of the teams in each of them eg TblSales (team 1, team 2 etc), TblMarketing (team 1, team 2 etc), TblRisk and so on. I defined relationships for these tables with the rest of the database using referential integrity which
seem to be fine.
Then After creating each combo box in the form, I went into design view and opened up form properties. Selecting the first business operation combo box, i went to the Event tab in the properties window and in the After Event field, entered the following
code:
Private Sub TblBusinessOperation After Update()
If No Error Resume Next
Select Case 'TblBusiness Operation'
Case 'Sales'
Cbo.Team = Row Source.Value 'Sales'
Case 'Marketing'
Cbo.Team = Row Source.Value 'Marketing'
Requery.cboteam
End Sub
I save the code and return to form view but when I select a value from the business operation combo box the team combo box just shows ALL the teams from ALL the business operations so the cascading hasn't worked. What is going wrong?
Thanks in advance
CG

Answer 1

Hi CG,
The problem in your case may be that you didn't properly set the RowSource property of the second ComboBox. As you didn't post the complete and correct code  in the AfterUpdate event handler of the first ComboBox, I'm not quite sure about this.
Maybe you can create a sample Access database, upload to OneDrive so that I can reproduce your problem and give you a solution in your way.
In my opinion, a better solution would be using a Recordset to populate the second ComboBox instead of using the default RowSource of the control. Because there may be some repeated team name in the other tables. To use ADODB RecordSet, you can get
a distinct list of the team names and populate the second ComboBox. This can be done all in the VBA code, not very complicated. You can refer to the sample code in this thread if you want:
Combobox rowsource - set to recordset, or
a query that dynamically iterates values
It would be more flexible to use SQL statement to retrieve the second ComboBox's source items you want. For how to use the Recordset, this MSDN document should help:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff820966(v=office.15).aspx
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