MS Access 2000 127-Character Limit

Posted By: jmbledsoe | Jul 18th, 2006 @ 12:17 PM
page 1 of 1
Comments: 2 | Views: 4524
#Jul 18th, 2006 @ 12:17 PM
jmbledsoe
jmbledsoe
whole different kettle of fish
I'd absolutely love to be spending my day working on .NET 2.0 AJAX-ey stuff Cool, but instead I'm debugging a problem in an MS Access database that I built *EIGHT YEARS AGO*!  Sad  Here's the situation:
  1. There is apparently an error in Access 2000 (all the way up through SP3) that will not allow you to update a column with a value from a form that has a length greater than 127 characters.  This behavior is well-documented on the newsgroups, but I have yet to see a KB entry acknowledging the issue.
  2. When I run the exact same process in Access 2003, the error does not present itself.  I assume that it's fixed there.
  3. I talked to the client about upgrading to Access 2003, and that's not an option for their organization.  Access 2000 is their standard.  [C]
With all that said, I have two questions:
  1. Is there a service pack/hotfix/other thing (other than Access 2003) that I could have the client install that would fix their problem?
  2. Is there a KB article or the like where MS acknowledges that the problem exists, so that I can at least show the client that they're running into a database engine problem, not a problem with the database.
Thanks!

Edit: Oh, and I really don't want to rewrite the procedure that causes the error.  I'm sure that would fix it, but it would be a PITA for me and not cost-effective for our client.
#Jul 20th, 2006 @ 3:34 AM
SimonJ
SimonJ
Will your database work OK with the runtime version of Access 2003? If it will, and you have the developer tools for Access 2003, you can freely distribute Access 2003 Runtime to all the client PCs and your database either as an Access 2003 MDB or, better still, an MDE file. The end users don't need to have a full licence for Access at all but they can have a full licenced previous version as well as Access 2003 Runtime.

Beware that there are several features that don't work with the runtime version and several "gotchas" where things don't work the same way in runtime as they do in the full version of Access. The main problems are where end users are required to use "developer" type features such as right clicking on a field in a form to perform filtering and so on. If they don't need to do that or your application gives them a better way of filtering then that problem won't affect you.

Simon Jones
#Jul 20th, 2006 @ 5:17 AM
jmbledsoe
jmbledsoe
whole different kettle of fish
Not a bad idea Simon.  I'll look into how feasable your suggestion is.  Big Smile
page 1 of 1
Comments: 2 | Views: 4524