Re: One for the MVPs?

Hi, Rob.

> It's looking like no-one is going to
> give me a definitive answer to this particular problem . . . although
> there have been a
> couple of responses here to date, they've been suggestions rather than a
> definitive answer.

I think you're expecting more from the newsgroup experience than it's
designed to give. Suggestions from experienced people on how to solve the
questioner's problem is the goal, not the consolation prize. No one who
uses this forum is an employee of a company providing free computer tech
support to everyone with Internet connections. UseNet is peer-to-peer
support from the volunteers in the community at large, so no one is required
to give definitive answers on any topic or to give free labor to fix the
database problems of those having trouble.

If you post a question in a newsgroup and receive a definitive answer, thank
the contributor and consider yourself lucky, because you could just have
easily received WAG's or no responses at all. Replies to your question
could come from a rocket scientist, a 15-year-old high school student, your
neighbor down the street, or someone who deleted the Internet this morning
while trying to get his E-mail to work, but has just discovered he can post
messages on UseNet and is wondering how "Y'all are getting along now that
the Internet is gone." Occasionally, a troll or Lord God King Bufu may stop
by to harrass or offer some advice, but thankfully that doesn't happen very
often in these Access newsgroups.

The Access newsgroups are fortunate in that there are enough experts to give
one or more competent responses, excellent advice, code samples, and links
to relevant Web sites to most of the questions posted here. I can't speak
for other newsgroups, but the folks who respond to questions in the Access
forums are genuinely interested in helping the questioner solve the problem.
This seems to be the case for most of Microsoft's technology-oriented
newsgroups. Unfortunately, the need for assistance is greater than the
voluntary manpower available. With an average of more than 250 new
questions posted daily to the Access newsgroups and ongoing discussions from
previous days, there's a limit to the amount of time any one expert can
devote to assisting with any particular database problem.

The system works fairly well because there are a good number of experts
willing to help others and who know that sharing their level of knowledge
will enrich the community. However, there's no guarantee that definitive
answers will be given for any particular question. If you want a guaranteed
answer, then consider hiring an expert because an expert _can_ guarantee
that you'll be satisfied with his advice -- or your money back.

> although 2 of these fields contain
> concatenation expressions to join 15 other text fields (potentially this
> could lead to over 2000 characters, but in practice it's extremely
> unlikely
> to do so

"Extremely unlikely" won't cut it. It must be completely impossible. If
even one record exceeds the 2,000 character limit, then the "too many fields
defined" error message will appear.

> The formatting of these fields for display is the same in
> both the form and the report.

The page layout and spacing of controls may look the same in both the report
and in the form, but the formatting is different. The formatting
characteristics of a report distinguish it from a form. If the formatting
were the same in these two objects, then the two objects would be
interchangeable. They aren't.

<From another post of yours:>

> BTW, have you seen my other question, re copy/paste of a
> record? I've not got a useable answer to that one yet either ;-)

You didn't mention a subform or master/detail tables, but that would be the
easiest way outside of the bookmark bug to pull off the problem you are
encountering. I can think of a few ways for the subform to overwrite the
wrong record when the combo box is used to make selections for the new
record, either by using a fan trap database design, or by using a
misconfigured form/subform combination, or by setting up the relations
incorrectly. Reading current records in the table works fine, but updating
and/or adding new records (depending upon which one of the situations I
mentioned is the cause) causes record overwrite problems. In any case, the
record cursor is not pointing to the record where you think it's pointing
when the paste is made.

Check whether foreign keys are involved in this table and if so, find out
what the values of these foreign keys are before pasting the record, what
the values are for the copied record, and what the values are after pasting
the record. You'll make an interesting discovery, because the mysterious
random record isn't so random after all.

<From another post of yours:>

> I changed the
> subject line here to (hopefully) provoke some curiousity.

The advantage goes to descriptive subject lines. Your new subject line
probably didn't get as much attention as you had hoped for because people
often ignore these types of posts. Too often, they degenerate into
mud-slinging such as the following venom-spewing episode from one irate
poster who didn't get the answer she wanted:

http://groups.google.es/groups?hl=en&lr=&th=f4fb5dd6acb47156&rnum=1

If you want to increase your chances of getting a quick answer to your
question, then consider using Microsoft's Web portal to the newsgroups on
the following Web page to post questions:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.access&lang=en&cr=US

In general, the easy-to-answer questions and the clearly stated questions
are answered the quickest. The questions that usually take the longest to
receive the first answer are the questions posted from outside of
Microsoft's Web portal, such as from regular newsreaders (as you've used)
and AccessMonster.com. It seems that more people are willing to answer the
questions posted from Microsoft's Web portal, since a potential reward is
involved. Recognition is received by contributors who are members of the
Web portal community and who have a considerable number of their replies
marked as answers.

Very few questioners have caught on to this phenomenon yet, so questioners
who have a history of marking replies as answers and who post a question
from the Web portal between 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. Eastern time (Zulu - 4) on a
weekday will usually evoke the quickest responses, since the largest pool of
responders is answering these questions.

If you do use the Web portal, be aware that there are a number of bugs which
Microsoft has been working on, so a good number of outages have been
occurring regularly. One of the bugs that hasn't been fixed yet is the
badge indicating a contributor's expertise level (the number of replies
marked as answers by the person who posted the question), so no one in the
Access newsgroups has a badge yet, although several people have earned the
first level badge. The first Access contributor to earn the first level
badge was Kevin Sprinkel, so congratulations to him.

Of note is one particular contributor who started posting replies to
questions several weeks ago and is just about to earn the first level
badge -- which I find rather odd considering the rate of his replies being
marked as answers is twice as fast as our top contributors who have been
contributing their fantastic answers to the newsgroups for many years and
have earned the title of MVP. This would indicate that his answers are far
superior to these world class contributors, so as an Oracle DBA trying to
learn as much as I can about the problems my clients encounter with their
database applications, I did some research to see what more I could learn
about Access from his answers. Far too many of his replies indicate an
inexperienced Access developer, not someone who can "walk the walk," let
alone someone who is world class. So in the future when Microsoft gets the
bug fixed, if you see a badge next to the name of someone posting a reply in
Microsoft's Web portal, just think "caveat emptor."

HTH.

Gunny

See http://www.QBuilt.com for all your database needs.
See http://www.Access.QBuilt.com for Microsoft Access tips.

(Please remove ZERO_SPAM from my reply E-mail address, so that a message
will be forwarded to me.)
Beware to those who use munged addresses: known newsgroup E-mail harvesters
for spammers are Ripley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


"Rob Parker" <CUT_THIS robpparker at optusnet dot com dot au> wrote in
message news:eDPlpYaWFHA.1404@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Hi Gunny and Tina,
>
> I certainly didn't mean to imply that the quality of answers in these
> newsgroups was poor - quite the contrary. I'm extremely impressed by the
> knowledge (and patience!) of the many responders to problems posted here.
> And there was an IF in my statement. It's looking like no-one is going to
> give me a definitive answer to this particular problem; as I said in my
> original post in this group, this problem was posted for over two days in
> the Reports newsgroup with not a single response; although there have been
> a
> couple of responses here to date, they've been suggestions rather than a
> definitive answer.
>
> Back to the technical stuff: the form and report are based on the same
> query, and the dataset from that query contains almost all numeric fields;
> to be precise, there are 2 long integers, 4 text fields (none of which
> exceeds 255 chars with the current data, although 2 of these fields
> contain
> concatenation expressions to join 15 other text fields (potentially this
> could lead to over 2000 characters, but in practice it's extremely
> unlikely
> to do so, since for any records only between 1 and three of these fields
> will actually contain any data)), and the remaining 161 fields are either
> single or double. The formatting of these fields for display is the same
> in
> both the form and the report.
>
> Rob
>
>
> "tina" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:zDDhe.764269$w62.744391@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> i heartily agree with Gunny. the deductive abilities of many of the MVPs
> and
>> other expert developers in these newsgroups is nothing short of amazing.
> and
>> that so many of them give so freely of their time and expertise in the
> same
>> field where they make their living, is incredibly generous. sometimes the
>> real head-breaker problems are due to underlying design issues that
>> simply
>> can't be unraveled without hands-on examination. there are a number of
>> highly skilled developers here that i would recommend my company hire, in
> a
>> heartbeat, to troubleshoot a database problem that i was unable to solve
>> with the assistance of these volunteers.
>>
>>
>> "'69 Camaro" <ForwardZERO_SPAM.To.69Camaro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
> in
>> message news:0ECE2145-C0A9-4B61-AAD8-C1053F3D277B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> > Hi, Rob.
>> >
>> > > Where can I get a definitive answer, if no-one in the newsgroup(s)
>> > > can
>> help?
>> >
>> > <Cough!> No one?!! Many of the people who answer questions in the
>> > newsgroups can troubleshoot others' database problems most of the time
>> with
>> > just a few clues and after asking a few of the right questions --
> without
>> > ever laying eyes on the database itself. If you think about it, that
>> takes
>> > incredible talent. Many of these folks work with Access for a living,
> and
>> > what assistance they offer to people in need in these newsgroups
>> > without
>> > charge is only a fraction of the spectacular services they offer to
> their
>> > paying clients.
>> >
>> > If I needed a definitive answer but didn't already know how to
>> troubleshoot
>> > tricky problems in Access, I'd put my go-fasters on my feet and zoom
> over
>> to
>> > the reports newsgroup, do some research to find the consultants who can
>> > obviously "walk the walk" and hire one of them for a fraction of what
>> > Microsoft charges for tech support. These experts can give a lot more
>> > valuable advice about your database by actually looking at it than they
>> can
>> > from reading short descriptions of what the problem is.
>> >
>> > And remember that the data source for a report and a form can be the
> same,
>> > but the resulting data set for the report can be a little different to
>> > accommodate the formatting. Check to ensure that no formatted record
>> exceeds
>> > 2,000 characters in the report (excluding Memo and OLE fields), because
>> this
>> > too will result in the "too many fields defined" error message in the
>> report,
>> > even with far fewer than 255 fields.
>> >
>> > HTH.
>> >
>> > Gunny
>> >
>> > See http://www.QBuilt.com for all your database needs.
>> > See http://www.Access.QBuilt.com for Microsoft Access tips.
>> >
>> > (Please remove ZERO_SPAM from my reply E-mail address, so that a
>> > message
>> > will be forwarded to me.)
>> > Beware to those who use munged addresses: known newsgroup E-mail
>> harvesters
>> > for spammers are Ripley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >
>> >
>> > "Rob Parker" wrote:
>> >
>> > > Thanks for the interest. Seems (from responses so far, in both this
> and
>> the
>> > > reports newsgroup) that no-one knows what the problem is, or if
> there's
>> an
>> > > alternative to my kludge subreport for totals workaround.
>> > >
>> > > C'est la vie :-)
>> > >
>> > > BTW, have you seen my other question, re copy/paste of a record?
>> > > I've
>> not
>> > > got a useable answer to that one yet either ;-)
>> > >
>> > > Where can I get a definitive answer, if no-one in the newsgroup(s)
>> > > can
>> help?
>> > >
>> > > Rob
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > "Sandra Daigle" <Invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> > > news:%23tvZiV8VFHA.2796@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> > > > Well it was worth a shot - I'm not really sure what else might be
>> going
>> > > on.
>> > > <snip>
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>>
>>
>
>


.

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