[AccessD] Property Value is too large

[Charlotte Foust]

I ran into it when I was active and dealt with tables designed by
government employees who had taken an Access class.  They wanted to use all
the sparkly things the instructor showed them and put everything, including
the kitchen sink, into their tables.  I redesigned a lot of tables in those
days, which got me zero appreciation but made the apps work. ;-)

Charlotte Foust
(916) 206-4336


On Sun, May 14, 2023 at 3:27 PM Stuart McLachlan <stuart at lexacorp.com.pg>
wrote:

> First time I've run across this in 30 years. I've been developing
> contantly in  Access since
> 1993 and never seen it before.
>
> When trying to add another field to a table, I got the message "Property
> Value is too Large"
> and couldn''t save the change. In fact I couldn't even save the table if I
> deleted a field in it - I
> got the same error
>
> This particular , table (which I did not design - but a couple of people
> here might recognise)
> had 178 fields!   Many of the fields had "Lookup" Comboxes specified
> containing long SQL
> select statements. Also a load of long "Descriptions".
>
> It turns out that there is a limit to the size of a table definition that
> Acceess can store (2KB ? )
> and  this is not just for the table structure , it  includes the Lookup
> and Description data for
> each field and the Index definitions. ( there are 20 indexes specified for
> this table, even just
> trying to delete one and saving the table gave the same message).
>
> After I cleaned a lot of the garbage out (primarily Lookup comboxes),  I
> was able to add the
> field.
>
> Yet another reason why I dislike specifying anything other than the
> default for field display in
> the table design - IMNSHO, that's NOT where user interfaces should be
> specified!!!
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