[AccessD] DeCorrupter Info

[Fred Hooper]

Hi Dan,

I've looked at two of the projects:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/access-srcutil/ -- It's incomplete and 
adds little if anything to what you've done. It doesn't use tables to 
control options and properties, as you did, but it did so successfully 
on my test file, so it may be more version-independent. It uses a tree 
view to control what's exported and imported, but ignored the top node 
(e.g. Forms) -- so I modified it to use the top node (copy available if 
anyone wishes). It handled Tables poorly, and couldn't recreate linked 
tables. Overall, I think your DeCorrupter is both better and easier to use.

I tried both versions of my test file and it responded the same as 
DeCorrupter to the differently-sourced objects. So this seems to be a 
result of the SaveAsText/LoadFromText processing and supports my 
suggestion to import the objects first.

https://github.com/timabell/msaccess-vcs-integration -- This is a VB6 
system, so the code is understandable to Access people. I didn't really 
look at the administrative stuff in the code nor run any of it, I mostly 
looked at how it handled the to/from text file stuff. The writers don't 
seem to use any MDB files, only AACSB files -- which reduced my 
interest. They do include two things that are different: (1) Convert 
between UTF-8 and UCS2-little-endian; I have no idea how useful this 
might be, their comments about it refer to external programs which I 
don't use; and, (2) Remove unneeded information from the text files 
a/k/a "sanitize" them; I suspect this has little benefit beyond reducing 
disk space used, a meaningless advantage.

This trip through others' code has reinforced my appreciation for your 
approach and code. The general export/import approach adopted by the 
first didn't make its potential use apparent, so it doesn't really have 
one. While a VCS is a good idea in an organization, I haven't 
encountered multiple coders on a single Access project -- so I doubt it 
has wide enough potential usage to justify the effort it has taken. The 
preceding projects have the same approach and limitations; I'm not going 
to look further at them.

In contrast, "DeCorrupter" has a clear objective and use; there's 
nothing extraneous and it accomplishes its purpose. I really appreciate 
the quality of your work. Thank you.


On another subject, I should have a copy of 2003 in a few days and will 
use it to populate the columns of the appropriate tables.

Best,
Fred