Question

is it possible in MS Access 2010 to restrict the records a user can see in a dataview form? For example User A should only see records from department A, whereas User B should only see records from department B.

Answer 1

Create a query which uses your business rule as a constraint to return only the subset of rows the user should be allowed to access. Then build your form with that query as its record source.

That approach depends on 2 conditions:

1. You have a method to identify the current user.
2. You can implement your business rule as a query WHERE clause.

You can use an API method to get the Windows account name of the current user. See an example at Get Login name. If your db file is MDB format, you could set up ULS (user level security), and get the Access user name with the CurrentUser() function. ULS is not supported in the newer ACCDB format, but Access 2010 can still use MDB format db files.

Either of those approaches could satisfy the first condition. You could also develop code to manage custom user accounts, but that seems like too much extra work to me.

Something like this could implement your business rule as a query WHERE clause. It uses the fOSUserName() function from the link above.

WHERE
    department = Switch(
        fOSUserName() = 'User A', 'department A',
        fOSUserName() = 'User B', 'department B')

However, a less brittle approach would be to inner join a table which contains the user names matched with the department(s) they should be allowed to view.