Fields are getting blanked out, but why?

[Jay Talbott]

I wrote a billing/inventory application for a client which has worked fine for many years. Within the last two weeks, all of the fields in three records in the inventory table have been blanked out. The records were not deleted, and as you would expect, when using find by key on inventory (part) number, the cursor would go right to the blank record, because the index had not been updated.

I do not think that this is a referential integrity issue, but why are all of the fields getting blanked out? I do not think it is user error, because the users have not changed.

Any thoughts would certainly be appreciated.

Jay Talbott

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Fields are getting blanked out, but why?

Jay, here's a wild guess...

Are you looking at the data in a form based on a set?

If so, and the layout contains fields from a child table you will see blanks on screen if there is no child record linked to the current parent.

Is it possible the user deleted some child records recently?

I've seen something similar in my reports. During data entry I use a set, but then later on, I invert the set (parent becomes child and child becomes parent) just for the report. If the user deletes a record from the original parent table, at report time that table becomes the child, but in each case where a record was deleted there is no child record present, even though the report needs one. The result is a bunch of blank fields in my report.

As I said, this is a wild guess. Let me know if you figure it out.

-- tom

[Jay Talbott]

RE: Fields are getting blanked out, but why?

Tom,

As always, thanks for your thoughtful response.

>Are you looking at the data in a form based on a set?

No, I can right to the inventory table and all of the fields are blank. Actually, that is not quite true. What I see is a letter in the vendor field (like B or C) where there should be Barry Controls or Bosch. But all of the rest of the fields are blank, including '97, '98, and '99 sales, cost of item, Quantity on Hand, Quantity on Order, etc.

The problem is usually first noticed when they type a part number (which they usually have memorized) into the lineitem (child record) of the Order. No information, such as vendor or price, goes into the line, and going to the look up table for inventory shows blank information in all of the fields, even though the cursor goes right to the spot it should (i.e. if the part number is 5, the lookup goes right to the blank record between 4 and 6. Updating the index will put the blank record at the beginning of the table, but if the index is not updated, it stays right where it was.

Thanks again for trying.

Jay

[Wanda Friesen]

RE: Fields are getting blanked out, but why?

My first thought was that maybe the color of the type is the same as the field...I've done that in word processing by mistake. But then you say that the first character appears. You've tried updating indexes - how about packing the database? It's a long shot, but sometimes fixes very strange problems...then again, you probably knew that.
Wanda

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Fields are getting blanked out, but why?

Jay,

Have you considered the possibility that the client has a virus?

Is it possible the user "cut" the field values while trying to "copy" them?

I'm afraid you're going to have trouble spotting this one if the user cannot replicate the behavior for you.

-- tom