Repairing FE can populate drop-down lists/queries

A

Allen Browne

In case someone is searching for reasons why combos/list boxes may not show
any records, here's a strange one.

After repairing the back end and re-creating some relationships, some of the
combos in the front end were not populating. The solution ended up being to
run a compact/repair on the front end.

That's not something I think to do very often, particularly in an MDE with
no temp tables. I am guesing that the compact/repair changes the cached
information Access holds about linked tables, and that this in turn affects
the queries based on the linked tables.

If that guess is correct, then a compact/repair of the front end might be
important after any changes to the back end. Anyone have experiences that
confirm or negate that guess?

(Observed in Access 2003, 2000 file format, JET 4 SP8.)
 
G

Guest

Yes. I don't have a lot of experience in 2003, but in 2000, 97,
you should compact FE after compacting BE after making changes
to tables other than just adding a new field to the end of the field
list. Presumably re-linking has the same effect, but often it is
easier to just compact the FE.

In my experience, problems only show up after compacting the BE.
Presumably, adding a new field in the middle of the field list is
implemented
by just adding a field at the end of the list, plus some magic. Then
when you compact the BE, the field gets moved to it's 'correct'
position, breaking cached meta-data in the FE links.

(david)
 
A

Allen Browne

Thank you, David.

In this particular case, it was an index rather than a field that we added
to the back end, but the effect could be similar.

Access had managed to corrupt several fields (including the primary key) in
a record in one table, so it destroyed the enforced relations to a lookup
table and a related table, and recorded the problems in a table called
MSysCompactError, flagged with error code -1613. We deleted the corrupt
record and re-entered it, and recreated the lost relations. But the combos
still did not populate correctly until we compacted the FE as well. Customer
tells me this all happened following a day when "the network was not working
very well" so that makes sense.

It meshes with your experience, so thanks.
 

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