[AccessD] Ac2013 running out of resources

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Fri Jun 5 09:47:49 CDT 2015


An approach that I learned from lister Jim Dettman, with whom I worked
remotely for a while, and from whom I learned many things, might be of use
to you.

Jim used a technique that I had never even considered prior to working with
him and learning how his app was structured. In essence, there wasn't one
app but rather many -- and the many were all handled by Task Scheduler.
Many of them performed exactly one task, then exited. They were schedule to
run frequently, and did such things as Ask if a file exists in a folder,
and if so, process it then exit, else just exit; print an End-of-Day
report, then exit; and so on.

Previous to working with Jim, I had habitually designed apps as all-in-one
enterprise-wide apps, using security to restrict access to those entitled
to the various levels. My approach, compared to Jim's, had at least three
serious flaws: 1) the app was huge, and 2) it presented far more options
than any given user at any given level might need, and 3) it required human
intervention to do things such as print daily, weekly and monthly reports,
which in turn demanded that some human remember to execute them.

Each of the numerous Access apps took up very little disk space in Jim's
scheme, and all that was required was a knowledge of Task Scheduler, which
demands all of a few minutes of your time.

Another advantage of Jim's approach is that whenever any given automated
task demands revision, you have precisely one task to examine, and can
avoid loading a monster app.

You might consider this approach in your situation. Create a separate app
for each report you need to run, then queue them up in Task Scheduler at a
frequency appropriate to the situation. And then fogeddaboudit.

Since Jim taught me this technique, I have done about a dozen free updates
to apps I've written for previous clients, who were already happy with what
I had delivered, but I did it in the spirit of sharing new discoveries, and
I guess, also to win some Brownie points with said clients.

To Jim: thanks again for leading me to a better way.

Arthur
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