[AccessD] Access 2021 accde (64 bit) incompatible with Access 2013 64 bit

[Jim Dettman]

 As Charlotte and Stuart noted, going backward is problematic.

 One thing I would check is the references.  Some will automatically update
to the latest version.   You compile and distribute, and now your earlier
users have a problem.   Usually though that will outright break the app.
However, with Access 2013 and up, a lot of things have changed internally
and it's now all the same "version" more or less because a lot more is
shared across versions.   That's why you can't mix bitness between versions
anymore with Office 2013 and up (i.e. you can't have Access 2013 32 bit, and
Access 2016 64 bit on the same machine).   It's also why from Access 2016
and up, you'll always get 16 as the version.

 And of course that's outside of all the features that get turned on and off
now based on your license/version, which easily could effect how the ribbon
behaves.

 As noted, always develop/compile in the lowest version that your users will
be using, and this a rule of thumb that has always been true with Access.

 I would setup a couple of VM's on the development machine and have 32 and
64 bit edition of Access 2013 installed in those.

 Jim.

-----Original Message-----
From: AccessD On Behalf Of Ryan W
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2021 6:35 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
<accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
Subject: [AccessD] Access 2021 accde (64 bit) incompatible with Access 2013
64 bit

We're upgrading to Office 2021, I made a small change to a form to fit
better with the new UI (the runtime ribbon is a bit taller for some reason)
in one of my forms which fixed the form issue for a user currently running
Access 2021.

However, users who are still on 2013 during this rollout are now getting
2467 coming out of a JIT class John Colby assisted with, and a ribbon
button that simply calls DoCmd.OpenForm "MyFormName" now errors out with a
vague message.

Literally nothing in the DB changed aside from the one form, a decompile,
compile then compact&repair and a recompile into an accde and distributed.

I've since remedied the update mechanism I use to split 2013 and 2021
accde's into different directories on the server for them to pull down and
use... but was curious if anyone had any clues?  I'm not moving across
bit-ness or any major changes, no function calls that are erroring out rely
on conversion to 64 bit (PtrSafe etc).

Shouldn't this front end still function under an older version granted I
haven't changed anything that should be a show stopper?

The form I changed isn't even the form that the errors on open reference
either....

The challenge in debugging now is that I do not have an active copy of
Access 2013 64 bit that allows for development. Only runtime environments
for 2013.
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