Old Script Stopped Working

[rtbtat]

Hello Guys:

Although I’ve been a member of the Alpha Community for more than 15 years, I took a 1-year hiatus so I’m totally out of it. Things that were second nature only one year ago, seem almost foreign to me. It's amazing how quickly we forget things if we don't use them every day.

Anyway, I have an old customer who was running their application on Version 5 trouble free for years. However, they recently upgraded to version 7 and a script that was running perfectly under the old version is no longer working. After the upgrade, they get a subelement error when pushing the form button that runs the script.

My skills are very rusty. I can’t seem to figure out why this is happening. It’s a very complex script, however, the error is occurring at the very beginning of the script, long before anything complex happens. I may be wrong but I suspect that some of the pointer commands may have changed in Ver 7.

The Form where the script is located is based upon a table called tblMunHrs so there are no sets involved. I ran debug() and noted the error is a “Property Not Found, SubElement error” that occurs when the script tries to capture the values in the table's two Date Fields called First_Date and Last_Date. Those are the last two lines in the shortened version of the script below.

I left the debug() commands in the script. Here’s the first portion of the script which stops at the vDateFirst = T1.First_Date and vDateLast = T1.Last_Date lines. Does the solution stand out as something that changed in version 7?

Thanks,
Robert

'----------------------------------------
Dim T1 as P

Debug(1)

T1 = table.current(1) 
'-------------------------------------------
'Establish the variables we will used to
'copy the current running totals from 
'tblMunHrs to tblMunHrsPrev
'Initiate each value as zero 
'-------------------------------------------
Dim Shared vDateFirst as D	 
Dim Shared vLastDate as D  

vDateFirst = {}
vDateLast = {}
'--------------------------------------
'Obtain the values of each variable from 
'the current RunTot number in each area
'using table.current() which is tblMunHrs
'----------------------------------------
[B][COLOR="Purple"]vDateFirst  = T1.First_Date[/COLOR][/B]
[COLOR="Purple"][B]vDateLast  = T1.Last_Date[/B][/COLOR]

debug(0)

[Stan Mathews]

I don't see why it would cause a problem but the first thing I noted was

Dim Shared vLastDate as D

vDateLast = {}

vDateLast = T1.Last_Date

[rtbtat]

Hi Stan:

Good observation but that was merely a typo while editing the board message.

Dim Shared vLastDate as D

Even though I started out by cutting and pasting from the original script to the one I posted on the message board, I did some manual editing of the message and somehow foolishy messed up that variable , but only on the message board. I checked the original script and that line is correct as follows:

Dim Shared vDateLast as D

In addition, the script doesn't even get to that line, it stops cold at the previous line which is:
vDateFirst = T1.First_Date

The user sees a less technica error:
"Extra characters at end of expression"

[Stan Mathews]

Ah, the dreaded extra characters ...........

There was a thread in the v6 area today where a script crash occurred because v5 allowed an uncommented line of dashes as a segment separator.

IOW in v5 you seem to be able to have

code
-----------------
code

instead of

code
'-------------------
code

while v6 and v7 are more strict. You might look for something similar because I see nothing that would yield either of the errors you have encountered.

[rtbtat]

Hi Stan:

Do you know that was the first thing I checked? I only posted a small portion of the script online, it is actually a very lengthy one. Before posting my message, I carefully checked to ensure there were no missing apostrophes and couldn't find any.

But in retrospect it turns out you were correct! After reading your message I went back and scrutinized every line where I had comments and they all had apostrophes. However, there was one line of dashes where I left it out. Guess I didn�t check as carefully as I originally thought. I wonder why versions 5 and 6 allowed that silly formatting error?

Problem solved! Thanks a lot Stan, I truly appreciate your help.