Using a unique key value or otherwise isolating a specific record via selection against values in its attributes is certainly preferable to choosing a row to update via its position in a result set, unless the use case actually makes use of that position info as a meaningful descriptor of the data in some fashion.
On 9/18/20 10:46 AM, Igor Korot wrote: > Hi, Johnathan, > > On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 12:34 PM Jonathan Strong > <jonathanrstrong@gmail.com <mailto:jonathanrstrong@gmail.com>> wrote: > > Are you looking to arbitrarily update the field in the fifth row, or > can the row that needs to be updated be isolated by some add'l > attribute? What's the use case? > > > What do you mean? > I don't have any other attributes. > > I want to understand how to emulate MS Access behavior, where you have a > form > with the arbitrary query, then you can go to any record in that form and > update any field. > > Is it even possible from the "pure SQL" POV? Or Access is doing some > VBA/DB/4GL magic? >
When you are updating a record in a form the framework(Access in your case) is using some identifier from that record to UPDATE that particular record in the database. From when I used Access, I seem to remember it would not give you INSERT/UPDATE capability on a form unless you had specified some unique key for the records. So you need to find what the key(generally a PRIMARY KEY) is and use that to do the UPDATE.