ADP in Source control and Null Fields now returning EMPTY

[TechnoBill]

Hi,
We have a large corporate project that is an ADP hooked up to SQL. Many
Programmers work on it so it is under sourcesafe control through the IDE.
This has been working fine for many years. We have just come across a new
problem we cannot resolve.

If we Create a new ADP on someone's machine using the option to create a
database from the sourcesafe project. We started getting weird errors when
they ran the application, where the code did not seem to be doing the right
thing. When debugging the code, we discovered that on some bound forms, null
fields were returning a value as 'Empty' instead of Null.. So code that would
check to see if a field is null and then perfrom an action was doing the
wrong thing as it was not Null it was Empty. I understand the difference
between null and empty, but Empty should not be showing up in this context:
On the Same SQL DB they were Null before the project was put into sourcesafe
but when we create the ADP from sourcesafe project they are returning Empty
instead of Null so code all over the place is doing the wrong thing.

Just to add to the confusion.. If I then create a new ADP and import all the
forms and Modules from this misbehaving ADP.. The new ADP runs correctly
showing Nulls where they should be. (but get this...if I then put that
workiing ADP into a new sourcesafe project.. it still works OK untill I blow
away the ADP and then tell it to create a new ADP from the sourcesafe
project. At which point the problem rears ists ugly head again.

I assume some 'setting' in the ADP is being changed when the sourcesafe/ide
creates a brand new ADP from the sourcesafe project.

BTW.. its not a Sourcesafe problem as I have also tried other Source control
programs that integrate to the Access IDE and we have the exact same problem
once we create the ADP from Sourcesafe.. so it must be in the IDE

We can't change the code as it is a massive project and changing all the
code that uses NZ and Isnull functions to try and handle both Empty and Null
values would be cost restrictive.

Any clues anyone?

 

[TechnoBill]

Sorry I forgot to mention that it is an Access 2000 Project and we have all
the service packs up to service pack 3 installed.. we also tried other combos
in different environements with and without service packs and still no go. It
used to work once as we have dozens of projects that work.

 

[Guest]

ADP's are stored as text in version control. The process of
saving and loading from text is not the same as the process
of entering or importing. I know that when using MDB's,
loading from text skips the step of creating object properties
from bound recordsets. There may be a similar problem with
ADP's.

With MDB's, the only solution was go to each bound form
and reset the recordsource. Instead, we adopted coding
practices which never depended on features which were
not supported by SaveAsText/LoadFromText.

(david)