[AccessD] Learned something else new today

Rocky Smolin - Beach Access Software bchacc at san.rr.com
Wed Mar 9 09:23:12 CST 2005


It's Windows.  Regional and Language options - language tab - just a check 
box and it installs.  TO use it, though, you have to display in Unicode.

Had to jump through this hoop for the Chinese version of the MRP system.

Rocky

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John W. Colby" <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com>
To: "'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'" 
<accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 4:26 AM
Subject: RE: [AccessD] Learned something else new today


> No idea.  Is that an Office thing or a Windows thing?  I told him to 
> always
> load the whole enchilada when installing Office because I was tired of not
> having the various pieces I needed to troubleshoot.
>
> John W. Colby
> www.ColbyConsulting.com
>
> Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause:
> http://folding.stanford.edu/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Rocky Smolin -
> Beach Access Software
> Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 12:13 AM
> To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
> Subject: Re: [AccessD] Learned something else new today
>
>
> They would have had to have the Asian language support loaded as well. 
> Why
> did they do that?
>
> Rocky
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "John W. Colby" <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com>
> To: "'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'"
> <accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 7:57 PM
> Subject: [AccessD] Learned something else new today
>
>
>>I wrote an app for an insurance call center.  The head tech cheese was
>>trying to get a bunch of report queries to work "easier" which were
>>written  by a young lady they assigned that task.  She had been pulling
>>a result  set
>> with dozens of event records for each claim then "cutting and pasting" 
>> the
>> right ones into excel.  JohnS had turned it into a group by and
>> successfully
>> caused it to pull just the result set he wanted.  However a memo field 
>> was
>> displaying a pair of Chinese characters (literally).  Very strange
>> looking,
>> and definitely not what we wanted to see.
>>
>> It turns out that he had a group by on that field.  Can you guess what
>> it was doing (or my educated guess anyway)?  It took me a few minutes
>> to figure it out!!!
>>
>> As you probably know, memo fields are not stored in the record, but
>> rather
>> a
>> (32 bit?) pointer to the memo is stored.  The GroupBy was causing the 
>> memo
>> field to be evaluated literally, thus it was taking the POINTER and
>> displaying (and grouping by) that.  I am also guessing that Access knew
>> that
>> a memo is supposed to be text so it was doing an implicit cstr() on the
>> pointer to attempt to coerce the value back to text and to display the
>> value
>> as a string.  Thus it was displaying Chinese (and other odd) characters.
>>
>> By changing the GroupBy to a Max (I think anyway) the memo field text
>> reappeared.
>>
>> I have never actually seen, or found any way to see the actual pointer
>> to the memo field out in the memo area but it certainly appears that
>> using a groupby on that field caused the pointer data itself to be
>> exposed as the "value" of the memo.
>>
>> Cool huh?
>>
>> So if your ever seeing a pair of totally weird characters in a group
>> by query, see if the field is a memo with a group by under it.
>>
>> John W. Colby
>> www.ColbyConsulting.com
>>
>> Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause:
>> http://folding.stanford.edu/
>>
>>
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>>
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