I'm driving myself a little crazy with this, and there's probably a super easy solution staring me in the face, but I'm just not seeing it.
Here's the relevant tables and fields.
tblBooks (BookID (PK), Title, Author, Publisher)
tblBookCategories (BookID (PK), CategoryID (PK), ReportID)
refCategories(CategoryID (PK), CategoryName)
tblReports (ReportID (PK), ReportDate)
I currently have a form for inputting books into tblBooks. There is a subform that has a combobox that allows for selecting categories to assign to the book. It's a continuous subform, so that if multiple categories are relevant to the particular book, multiples can be indicated on the subform. The combobox is populated with categories from refCategories. The book is stored in tblBooks, and tblBookCategories stores the categor(ies) assigned to a particular book.
Reports are sent out periodically. When a report is sent, an entry in tblReports is created, and the relevant entries in tblBookCategories have their ReportID field filled with the ID of the report. So in tblBookCategories, the ReportID field has two options: A report number, or an empty field.
What I would like to do is have it so that in my Book Entry form, where there are lines in the continuous subform, change it so that the category-selector combobox is replaced with a label that says something like, "Sent Blah Blah". So if a book has been assigned four categories, and one of those categories was sent in a report, then it'll list Category ComboBox, Category ComboBox, "Sent Blah Blah", Category ComboBox within the subform.
I hope this makes sense. I'm starting to suspect that subforms can't work like this, because it seems like anything I do code-wise affects all records of the continuous subform instead of just the one I'm trying to interact with.
You are correct, that anything you do in code affects the view for every record. Continuous Forms and Datasheet forms are not well suited for any task where you need that kind of control. In that case you must consider using ActiveX controls such as MS List View or iGrid from 10tec.