Invalid Data Warnings, How to track down 1

[CactysJack]

I have created a specialized database and it is about ready for primetime. However on the last modification where I added a new field to a table, I sometimes but not always get an "Invalid Data" popup when closing a report/ form or the whole program. It appears at random and I can't off hand see where it's coming from.

F1 didn't help me except broadly. Is there a diagnostic etc. to help find the problem? I am a newbie at Access working my way through with books and tutorials.

John

P.S. I just reworked the program to get rid of a field I had improperly named "NAME", a no-no as I found out. Not since but before going back to an early backup, I seemed to have too many crashes and loss of function as I worked through the development. Is Access prone to this or was it something I was doing. Again I wasn't able to diagnose being too new to know the tools. Knock on wood, the current version seems better behaved.

 

[RickSpr]

What does this "Invalid Data" popup look like? Is it a runtime error message? If so, what is the error number?

It's not terribly hard to crash Access with faulty VBA code, especially if you're trying to do something you haven't done before. My experience has been that, once you've crashed an Access database, it's probably damaged to some degree and becomes much more likely to crash again, or at least hiccup, later.

As a rule of thumb, I try compacting and repairing a database after it crashes. If I see any more flaky behavior after that, I close it, create a new database, recreate all the References (if any), and import all the objects from the original. (Be sure to check all the Advanced options in the Import dialog.) This takes a little longer, but it almost always works, and always leaves me with an undamaged database. Rick Sprague

 

[CactysJack]

Rickxpr,

Thanks for the info. I'll look closer next time but I don't think it had any other ID than just Invalid Data.

I can see what you mean by going back and rebuilding. That's basically what I did except I went back to a working version and redid it from there backing up after every change so I would waste less work when and if it crashed. Except for the final invalid data popup, my last version seems pretty stable.

But I wonder why there aren't tools to track down problems like when debugging code (most of my experience was in writing in assembly language). There may be such tools in Access but I haven't found them yet and may not be quite smart enough to use them (yet).

John