Meaning of error messages

[bookbean620]

I am the sexton for a township cemetery maintenance district. I use Alpha5 V7 to maintain information about grave site sales and who is buried where. I have been updating the database from information collected by reading old monuments. I have made many, many changes and additions to records and never had any problems until today.

I have imported hundreds of photographs of monuments to the burial entry form. The last time it didn't work. In the field where the photo is to be displayed I right clicked and selected import image. I selected the image file and pressed ok. And that returned me to the entry form. However, the photo never appeared. A right click on the image field now gives me the option to delete an image even though there is no visible image. Also, if I change any text or add text to the message field and then select the save record icon, I get error messages: "Error locking" and "Change must begin first".

What has happened that my database is locking up? Exactly when do these error messages mean?

--Craig

[Bill Parker]

Somehow Alpha's data entry mode has gotten out of synch. Close A5, and for good measure, reboot the computer to make sure any file locks are cleared.

After restarting the computer open Windows Explorer. For the table that contains the images, look for [tablename].FPT. It will show the file size, which can't be greater than 2 Gigabytes. If the images you are importing are large, this might end up being a problem.

I always "link" to images vs. importing them for this reason and because as the file size gets larger, performance suffers. You can explore "image reference file" for information about linking.

If your file size is below the maximum, restart A5 and see if the "missing" image is now visible.

Bill.

[bookbean620]

Will, Bill, you hit it on the head. The ncburial.fpt file hit 2.0 GB. Delete an image, then import works once.

Thank you for your quick and helpful responce.

I figured if images were linked and the link was broken, such as if the photo file got moved, I would have to re-enter each link for every burial record--thought I was smart by importing the image instead. Didn't figure on how big the file would get.

Okay, so I start over at the beginning at the record containing Burial Lot #1, grave #1, and delete the image in the monument field. Let's see, do I have to edit the table's field properties for the image field and/or edit the form?

Craig

[Bill Parker]

You will add an image File Reference field to the structure of the table. Initially you can leave the jpeg field in the table, but ultimately you should not need it if you redefine all the images as image file references. But you can start with both - some fields as embedded, others as references - as long as you show both fields on the form. (that may have been more information than you wanted.)

To add the image file reference to the form in design mode, just drag the field from the drag-drop list to the form and size it as needed. Then when entering records, right click on the field and specify the image to use - just like you do with an embedded bitmap. Look up image file reference in the help file for more info.

I generally store my images in a different directory so all the images are in one place for backup, etc. If there is any chance you might move this system to a different computer with a different directory structure, you probably want to look at the help file for the topic of Alias for the image reference file.

There are other techniques that can be used, but they require some xbasic coding, so if this approach works for you it is the way to go.

Bill.

[bookbean620]

Bill, thank you for your help.

Craig