Strange report error message - control must have focus

[Stephen Poley]

I have a report which prints data from a parent table and two child
tables (Contract and Kosten). Because it is a bit long, I suppress some
fields which are often empty, based on methods found in the archive for
this group: allowing can-shrink on the field itself and the following
code in the details section to suppress the label:

If (Me!InpassingWe rkproces.Text = "") Then
Me!InpassingWer kproces_Bijschr ift.Visible = False
Else
Me!InpassingWer kproces_Bijschr ift.Visible = True
End If

The suppressed fields occur in all three records.

When there is both a Contract and Kosten record this works fine. If
there is no Kosten record this works fine. But when there is no Contract
record I get an error message (translated from the Dutch) "you can only
refer to a property or method of a control if the control has the
focus". On debugging, the code complained about is the 'if' line of the
first instance of the label-suppression code above. If I comment that
out, it complains about the next instance.

I have looked in vain for differences in the ways I handle Contract and
Kosten records.

Can anyone suggest where I should be looking?
(Access 2000, Dutch version, Windows XP Pro)

========

Subsidiary question (much less important): the examples I found in the
archive all provided only the first half of the above IF statement. But
I found that the value of the 'Visible' property was maintained from one
detail record to the next: once I set it to False, it remained False for
all subsequent records. Has the behaviour of Access changed at some
point?

--
Stephen Poley

[Stephen Poley]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:25:28 GMT, Bob Quintal <rq******@sympa tico.ca>
wrote:

Smartin <sm********@yah oo.com> wrote in
news:w9******* *************@g iganews.com:

Wayne Gillespie wrote:

Use -
If (Me!InpassingWe rkproces= "")
instead of
If (Me!InpassingWe rkproces.Text = "")

The Text property is only available if the control has
focus...

I've noticed this too and have been puzzled by it. Isn't Text
the default property of a TextBox?

The default value of any control that can be bound to a field is
.value. At least the rule is consistent.

The .text property contains whatever the user has typed into a
control, for editing. since it can only be edited when the
control has focus, the property is only accessible when the
control has focus.

OK, I've tried various possibilities out, in the hope that it gives
useful information to future browsers of the archive. The following
works, i.e. it suppresses labels for empty fields in my report:

If IsNull(Me!Extra Info) Then
Me!ExtraInfo_Bi jschrift.Visibl e = False
Else
Me!ExtraInfo_Bi jschrift.Visibl e = True
End If

Using IsNull(Me!Extra Info.Value) also works.

(Me!ExtraInfo = "") and (Me!ExtraInfo.V alue = "") do not work for me. I
don't know whether one can get a zero-length string in an Access field -
I don't seem to have them, anyway.

(Me!ExtraInfo.T ext = "") should not work at all in reports according to
you and Rick, yet sometimes it does - see my original post. But, as I
discovered, it's not reliable and presumably should be avoided in
reports.

I would hazard a guess that at some stage someone at Microsoft thought
it would be handy to provide Text as a synonym to Value in reports, for
people who are used to VB. But if so, the idea was never carried through
consistently (and it seems a pretty bad idea to me anyway).

--
Stephen Poley

[Wayne Gillespie]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:51:20 +0100, Stephen Poley <sb************ ******@xs4all.n l> wrote:

OK, I've tried various possibilities out, in the hope that it gives
useful information to future browsers of the archive. The following
works, i.e. it suppresses labels for empty fields in my report:

If IsNull(Me!Extra Info) Then
Me!ExtraInfo_Bi jschrift.Visibl e = False
Else
Me!ExtraInfo_Bi jschrift.Visibl e = True
End If

Using IsNull(Me!Extra Info.Value) also works.

(Me!ExtraInf o = "") and (Me!ExtraInfo.V alue = "") do not work for me. I
don't know whether one can get a zero-length string in an Access field -
I don't seem to have them, anyway.

(Me!ExtraInfo. Text = "") should not work at all in reports according to
you and Rick, yet sometimes it does - see my original post. But, as I
discovered, it's not reliable and presumably should be avoided in
reports.

I would hazard a guess that at some stage someone at Microsoft thought
it would be handy to provide Text as a synonym to Value in reports, for
people who are used to VB. But if so, the idea was never carried through
consistently (and it seems a pretty bad idea to me anyway).

You can also test for Nulls and Zero-Length Strings together by using -

If Len(Me!ExtraInf o & vbNullString)=0

This is handy if the Allow Zero Length String property of the table is set to Yes, and the table could contain a mix of
either Nulls or ZLS's.

[Stephen Poley]

On Tue, 01 Nov 2005 02:59:42 GMT, Wayne Gillespie
<be*****@NOhotm ailSPAM.com.au> wrote:

You can also test for Nulls and Zero-Length Strings together by using -

If Len(Me!ExtraInf o & vbNullString)=0

This is handy if the Allow Zero Length String property of the table is set to Yes, and the table could contain a mix of
either Nulls or ZLS's.

Thanks.

--
Stephen Poley