Friday, September 15, 2006

BeTTR Compatibility

I have installed the Beta Two Technical Refresh, and this morning fired up my contacts database in Access2007.

I am suddenly confronted with problems.

In fairness I must confess that my Access VBA skills are not as good as yours.

There may well be serious deficiencies in my code that have escaped notice until now, but today I am receiving warnings that were not in effect yesterday. The difference is that today I am running not the Beta2, but the patched version - BTTR.

For over a year (Access 2000 and on) I have used a routine that updates various date fields when I post a follow-up date into the future. The background receives a colour showing whether the date is in the future or the past.

Today Access 2007 tells me that it can't find the field, but clearly the View Immediate tells me that it can find the field.

The problem possibly lies in the "#Name?" value that has crept in there. Perhaps earlier versions of Access didn't mind that value, or perhaps earlier versions didn't produce that value. Please see "my Access VBA skills" above.

In desperation, I resort to On Error Resume Next.

Desperation because I'm scheduled to make telephone calls right now, not learn VBA programming (see? I'm no different from you; I have a job to do).

I hate On Error with a passion. To me it indicates one of three things:

Lack of professionalism in the programmer (that is my case here; I'm not yet prepared to work out why I'm getting a "Name?" value).

Lack of planning in the programmer (that is my case here; I had not planned for an event such as faulty input data, or whatever it is that triggers this data).

Poor design in the product. I know that a good workman never blames his tools, but VBA provides no intrinsic function for testing a file's existence, or whether a project is password-protected, so we all resort to the trick of trying to do something and returning a trapped error if it fails.

Then it crops up again.

This time on a null field.

I'll swear I had no problem with this yesterday.

I could be wrong.

You knew this was going to happen.

On Error resume Next and a cheap'n'nasty Word macro, and we are back in business.

Baling Twine. We need more baling twine.

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