Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Fixed an Access bug several months later

As title. Here is the story:
Several months ago, I was asked to inspect a weird bug in MS Access. In the beginning, no one knew what went wrong; just the Access crashed when genenerating a weekly staff-project report. Then I figured out that when a staff called "Brian Ye" was included in the summary report, the report generator crashes. Once again, debugging with VBA was not pleasant. In the end, even after I got some one to help, none of us could figure out what went wrong after a couple of hours. Luckily, "Brian" was just an intern. When he left, problem's solved.

Today, the reporting bit crashed again. This time, it took me only 10 minutes to locate the problem which explains the problem before. Thanks to the induction method.  So today it was about reporting with a staff called "Alan Shaw". See the problem? Probably too difficult, 'cause I haven't mentioned that the Access report uses their initials for its header. So the initials for them are "AS" and "BY" -- yes, they are SQL keywords. That's the problem.

(I twisted the names of the above-mentioned staff slightly.)

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