Combo Box in Split Form not updating record? (1 Viewer)

I created a split form (see attached image) to allow people to logout paperwork that has been entered into the database I'm building. The idea is to allow the people completing the paperwork (or sample testing once I get around to those forms) to select which paperwork they have finished and then indicate it is done and out of the lab.

When a user has selected the appropriate disposition, they click the Logout button which timestamps the record, saves it, and closes the form.

But my issue now is that nothing is updating as I'm thinking it should

In order to get the dropdown to show the available options I had to link it to the table containing those options, which is not the same table the records are in. Could this be my issue?

I have seen several posts on here talking about split forms being a bad choice. Would I be better served creating a form which queries the records table for all "open paperwork" (paperwork without a disposition), displaying those records, allowing a user to select the record they want to logout and redirecting them to a different form to modify that record?

Split forms are definitely a "interesting" way of MS presenting data easily for basic tasks, but as you have read many of us more experienced chaps and chapesses struggled to make them do things that you would expect them to be able to do.

I suspect you may be suffering from one of those undocumented "features" of the split form.

Back to your issue - You shouldn't need to link the lookup table into your underlying query to get it to show you the data, simply use a normal combo box with it's record source set to the lookup table.

If you aren't editing the data then by all means link away and simply display the text from the other table.

I'm going to guess that you used a table level lookup on the table and so the combo values are not what is actually stored in the table.

My biggest problem with table level lookups is that they mask the actual data and that causes chaos every other place where you try to use the values and you can't actually use the values you can see. You have to use the actual stored values.