Combo box loses "autoexpand" feature

[WillDDS]

Has anyone else had this experience ?

I am developing in Access 2002 and have been plagued by a continuing problem. I can create combo boxes and the 'autoexpand' lookup feature works as it is supposed to.

At some point during development, the feature stops working, and if I look at the property sheet for the non-working control, the 'autoexpand' property is now "No" where it was previously "Yes".

During development, I frequently compile, compact & repair, or run all three tools. I have even gone through the steps to 'decompile', recompile, imported into a clean database, then run compact and repair. No combination of steps recovers the autoexpand feature.

In addition, if I find a previous version of the form where the combo box was working properly, delete the non-working form in the current database version, and import the working form, the combo box on the imported form now no longer works!

Any hints, insights, resolutions ?? Will Ryder
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Digital Data Systems

 

[thornmastr]

Auto expand is a very nice feature, and when used in conjunction with the admonition that a combo box should never contain more that 50 rows, it is very easy to use and worth utilizing.

Many people think nothing of using a combo box with over a thousand rows. IMNSHO, if your combo box is more than 40 rows find another approach to solve your problem. But, that certainly does not directly help you. Perhaps this explanation will. Autoselect puts Access into a tight IO bound process. The general rule of thumb is this, ten seconds per key stroke per 100 rows, so if you have 1000 rows, you can see how much time you should give Access to deal with your lookup on a per character basis. Your problem may be only that you are not giving it enough time.

HTH.
Robert Berman
Data Base consultant
Vulcan Software Services
thornmastr@yahoo.com