Getting to the Field

As with any ADO collection, the Item property is the default property of the collection. It returns the individual Field object specified by the name or index passed to it. Therefore, the following statements are equivalent for the sample Recordset:

objField = objRecordset.Fields.Item("ProductID")
objField = objRecordset.Fields("ProductID")
objField = objRecordset.Fields.Item(0)
objField = objRecordset.Fields(0)

If these methods are equivalent, which is best? It depends. Using an index to retrieve a Field from the collection is faster because it accesses the Field directly without having to perform a string lookup. On the other hand, the order of Fields within the collection must be known, and if the order changes, the reference to the Field's index will have to be changed wherever it occurs. Although slightly slower, using the name of the Field is more flexible because it doesn't depend on the order of the Fields in the collection.