Wierd Button Behavior (2000)

Topic

New Reply

Help! I am completely baffled.
Our membership database is giving us unexpected messages whenever our secretary clicks on any button which requests either viewing or printing a report with any concatenated fields in it. The wierdest part is that the SAME DATABASE viewed on MY computer works fine (we are networked – the database lives on her compueter – I am viewing the exact same copy of the database, although I view it using the copy of MSOffice/Access which is installed on my machine). AND another database with buttons which open reports with concatenated fields seems to work fine on both her computer and mine.

Here are the details
Whenever she (or I on her computer) click any button on any form which requests either viewing or printing any report, we get a dialog asking us for the parameter value of “Trim”.

If we just click “enter” to move past the dialog box, then it prints the report, but it prints “#error” for any field that is supposed to contain concatenated values.

The reports open and display completely properly if opened from the database window. It is only when they are opened by a button on a form that they don’t work.

We have tried buttons for at least five different reports with the same results (and one button for a non-concatenated report). The five buttons we tried are on two different forms.

As recently as this past Monday the database was working just fine. We had made no changes to it since a couple weeks ago, and those changes were very minor and affected only one form (I added a hyperlink field and wrote some code into that form to update that field when another field is updated)

I compacted the database. That didn’t help.

Both databases which I tested – both the one that worked and the one that didn’t were created by me, and all the buttons were created using the wizard.

How can this database work on my machine and not work on her machine??? I had thought maybe we needed to uninstall and reinstall the MS Office program on her computer, but since that other database works fine it doesn’t seem like the problem is in the program….. (we haven’t tried this – she’s had too much bad luck doing that so we are waiting for a service person to show up and do that for her)

Any ideas? I’m baffled.
-cynthia

Reply | Quote

Replies

It sounds as if you have a “missing references” problem. From her computer in your database, open a module or go into de######. Then from menu bar select Tools | References. Scan down the list and see if any are marked as “missing”. If so, make note of which one, then uncheck that reference, then close box. Then go back in and re-select that reference.

Reply | Quote

BTW, is this one database or a split database? If a single database, you would be wise to split the database into a backend (tables and relationships) and a frontend (everything else). Give each of you a copy of frontend (to run from local drive), and put backend in shared folder one 1 machine.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for the suggestions. Can’t try them ’til the service guy leaves, and as I’m off now for four days, that will probably be Monday.

Couple questions, though. I DID make some changes to the references two weeks ago – I did it on MY computer, but I was assuming that I was making a change to the database and it would be reflected anywhere we ran the database (I added the references to MSOutlook so we could launch e-mail automatically – haven’t finished it yet so haven’t tried that on her computer, only mine). If I make a change to the references, do I need to make those changes on every computer that accesses the database? And could ADDING a reference to Outlook on my computer mess up the reference to trimming (or whatever it is that might now be missing) on her computer? (Her computer hosts the database).

Might be a case of a little knowlege being a dangerous thing here! Maybe I should have left those e-mail addresses alone!

I’m also interested in the split database option. This is something I know nothing about, though I’ve picked up a bit just in various posts here that it has been a factor. Does that mean I would have my tables all in one database, and that the database containing all the forms, queries, etc would then link to those tables? I’m intrigued.

Thanks,
Back Monday,
-cynthia

Reply | Quote

References are a royal pain, as they can end up causing all sorts of problems. The reference to Outlook could be the cause, if you have different versions of Outlook on the 2 machines.

You definitely should consider splitting the database. It solves alot of problems. Access has a Database splitter for just this purpose. I routinely split virtually all my databases, even if they are not to be networked.

Reply | Quote