Yesterday was a fun day.

We generate a good amount of our largest customers invoices through MS Access.  Yes.  That's right, MS Access.  Don't get me started.  Once the invoices are generated, there's a website that lets my group review and release the invoices to the customers.  It does some nice things - lets them decide if it should be excel or pdf, printed and/or emailed, and sends a copy to our document storage website.

I got the database running yesterday, and then set my focus on moving the website over to our new win 2003 server.  Previously, it was being hosted on a desktop pc and we were always facing issues with too many users trying to log on at once.  I had expected a quick transition, but it was a day of constant debugging.  Everyone time I resolved an error, I moved two steps ahead and hit another issue.  It's a good testiment to documentation, because I'm sure I've had to troubleshoot half of the issues previously but couldn't remember what I had done, or what downloads I had needed previously to resolve.

Anyways, I got that up and running, only to find the invoices were printing w/o the company logo.  The font wasn't installed.  Doh.  Then the page numbers were printing incorrectly - wrong version of excel was installed.  Double-Doh.

Finally, the kicker - after about a third of the invoices had been released, we finally noticed the pivot table we put on the front page wasn't there. 

Now, the code for this access database hadn't changed from the previous month, and we haven't installed any new software on the computer that is running the database.  Is this the result of some software update pushed to the computer?  I don't know - What I finally found was the issue was the way we declared the range objects

"Dim myrange as range" suddenly had ceased to work.  I changed it to "Dim myrange as excel.range" and we were back in business.  WTF.

It was also a nice lesson in error handling because I found that previously the code had been set up to skip the pivot table generation and go on it's happy way if an error appeared.  Hence why we were unaware of the issue.

4/3/2008 8:08:57 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)    Comments [0] Trackback