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IF your lucky 20, if your in the states typically 14, unless your local pub has the good glasses that allow a full 16 with 2 inches of head.
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You only get two inches of head? 
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Netblue wrote: The previous programmer could have at least cached the data on the client side or something...
That would have been nice.
Netblue wrote: The worst part is this database is almost always called over a VPN connection, so bandwidth is critical.
Is it possible to make any changes to that or are you stuck with it?
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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Paul Conrad wrote: Is it possible to make any changes to that or are you stuck with it?
There are 8 locations connecting to a central site, VPN over the net. A better way to do it would be SQL replication, but the locations can't support a server of their own, at least not right now.
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That's a bummer.
Netblue wrote: A better way to do it would be SQL replication
Sure, but then that could open up a new can of worms when trying to manage all those replications and synchronize them, if you needed to. Maybe not, because I don't know what kind of data flow or volume you are dealing with.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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Just a second here:
What if the application was being used in the UK, then used in the US or Australia? Conversions do vary... 
(though maybe a localised lookup table, and, sure - why not - a little caching or even dare I suggest hardcoding might help perf a little )
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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And then somebody suddently alters some conversions in the database and all clients with the cached data will have an update problem until the next session. To avoid this, we now need a way to let the clients know that the cached data is not up to date. And then.... 
Honestly, this is exactly what blind obedience to 'good practices' leads to. Of course it's a good idea to make the database work for its money, but this should nonetheless have been avoided. Quick and dirty solutions to correct this lead to still more quick and dirty patches. Recommended practices can not replace thinking.
A while ago he asked me what he should have printed on my business cards. I said 'Wizard'.
I read books which nobody else understand. Then I do something which nobody understands. After that the computer does something which nobody understands. When asked, I say things about the results which nobody understand. But everybody expects miracles from me on a regular basis. Looks to me like the classical definition of a wizard.
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When I joined my current company about three years ago, I was given the task of maintaining the company's business critical order processing system. This is written as an Access front end to a SQL Server back end, and was written by a contractor who had left at the end of his contract with a large amount of the company's money in his bank account!
Some investigation after my first week or two lead me to discover the following horrors:
There was not a single error trapping routine in the whole front end - if something fell over, the standard error message was "an error occurred in the click event of btn....."
Each routine that inserted a record was written as a Sub, rather than a function that returned a success/failure value.
Every user on the database was assigned DBO permissions!
There was absolutely no referential integrity defined in the database.
There was no transaction processing in the system - if someting fell over part way through (as it often did), updates/inserts/deletes had to be rolled back manually using Enterprise manager.
An example of his coding style is shown here - it shows how he retrieved a single record using its primary key:
Set rstMain = New ADODB.Recordset
Set cmd = New ADODB.Command
cmd.ActiveConnection = CurrentProject.Connection
cmd.CommandText = "spSELocationForSageImport"
Set prm = cmd.CreateParameter("@LocationCode", adVarChar, adParamInput, 20, "Sage")
cmd.Parameters.Append prm
cmd.CommandType = adCmdStoredProc
rstMain.Open cmd, , adOpenDynamic, adLockOptimistic, adCmdStoredProc
With rstMain
Do While Not .EOF
strLocation = ![Location]
.MoveNext
Loop
End With
Set rstMain = Nothing
Maybe I'm missing something, but do you need to loop though a dataset that can only contain one record?
His date handling was also a bit esoteric:
txtDateCreated = Month(Now()) & "/" & Day(Now()) & "/" & Year(Now())
I recently had occasion to rewrite some of his code that applied changes from an external system to the database. His code took two or more hours to run and slowed the system so much it was unusable (meaning I usually had to do unpaid overtime to apply the data out of hours). One of the lovely bits of code he wrote looped through a data set of 7000+ records, taking a value from each record and using this as a parameter in a stored procedure that retrieved a related value from a lookup table. Changing the source query of the main dataset to join it to the lookup table and return the value directly removed 7000+ executions of the stored procedure.
Tweaking the query, adding an index and cleaning up his code reduced the run time to approximately 3 minutes!
====================================
Transvestites - Roberts in Disguise!
====================================
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I have the feeling that the guy in question once read a chapter on ADO and has abused the same example ever since ....
I'm largely language agnostic
After a while they all bug me 
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Hehe, I basically suggested the same 
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Chris Quinn wrote: Maybe I'm missing something, but do you need to loop though a dataset that can only contain one record?
Because it returns a list with 0 or more values. Or maybe he only knew that single pattern 
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As the others have said, it does look like he found some example and kept using it over and over. Pretty much any VBA coding in Access is a strong candidate for being a coding horror.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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I don't agree - it's not the tool you use - it's the tool that uses it!
====================================
Transvestites - Roberts in Disguise!
====================================
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True. Access can be alright when used correctly.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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By default, Access should be removed from the PC of anybody who is tempted to open it up and knock together a crappy app with zero understanding of basic database procedures. Hello. It's called normalization people, and it's not an optional extra. If you don't understand normalisation, then you should be in a more touchy-feely career and not one that demands reaching higher than a 2 on the clue-o-meter.
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Yeah. Anyone wanting to use access should in addition to being required to pass the 'not excel' test for data design, also understand why changes are saved immediately instead of when you click the save icon. [my younger sister}, who creates single flat table dbs and never manages to grasp why I explain it isn't bundled in the cheap version of office, I mean you. 
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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dan neely wrote: it isn't bundled in the cheap version of office
Thanks to God for that
We have Access 2007 installed in the labs at my college where I teach and I took one look at it, and never looked at it again 
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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At the risk of sounding like a fool, could I ask you to please explain the bit about changes being saved immediately instead of when the save icon is clicked.
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Databases have implicit save behaviour, e.g. triggered by an action such as moving to a new row. An application like Excel does not know when you want to save the data, so it only saves when you trigger an explicit save.
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Okey doke -- but this is only the case when there is data binding between the database and the client right? I'm sure there must be plenty of apps out there, other than Excel, that required an explicit save.
I'm not sure if I get the point that was originally being made. Was this being suggested as a good thing, a bad thing, or just an example of where the "developer" mis-understood what was going on?
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This was a case of a luser insisting on using the wrong tool (access instead of excel), and then continually whining about how it didn't do what she wanted.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: Access should be removed from the PC of anybody who is tempted to open it up and knock together a crappy app with zero understanding of basic database procedures. Hello. It's called normalization people, and it's not an optional extra. If you don't understand normalisation, then you should be in a more touchy-feely career and not one that demands reaching higher than a 2 on the clue-o-meter.
Amen to that
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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Comeon I have written several VBA programs both nothing as horrible as that.
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Sad: I have to maintain code like this.
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