[AccessD] Practical way to handle non-standard length "long text" fields

[Rocky Smolin]

Ryan:

I don't know of a good way to handle this. I have used KeyDown to good
advantage when I wanted to inspect every keystroke in a text field. But
it's a little kludgey.

Two ideas: I believe if you use the input mask property to allow a textbox
to take a maximum number of characters. It will not allow any more
characters than that input mask allows. So at 500 characters no more input
would be accepted. But that won't generate a message to the user. And I
don't know if you can input mask a text box to limit to that high of a
number of characters.

A second thought would be to accept the data into an unbound text box and
in the Lost Focus event, test for the length of the string that was input -
copy it to the bound text box if shorter than your Max length, or give a
message to the user that their entered text was too long and then shift the
focus back to the unbound text box.

HTH

r



On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 7:01 AM Ryan Wehler <wrwehler at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there any practical way to handle non-standard VARCHAR(MAX) "long text"
> fields in access?
>
> If I set one to VARCHAR(500), Access still treats it as Long Text(MAX) and
> the user doesn't really know it's going to be a problem until they exit the
> field and an error pops up.
>
> Ideally what I'd like is for access to just stop typing as it it would if
> you hit the char limit for the field.  Is there a way to do that without
> using OnChange or KeyDown events to count characters up and warn the user?
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