[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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