Text not visible until focus is received

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bodi Klamph
  • Start date Start date
B

Bodi Klamph

Hi

Using Access 2002 and SQL Server 7 I have a problem with drop downs. It's
only started happening even though I can't think of anything that's changed
to cause such behaviour.

The combo boxes are linked to a table, and the values are actually being
retrieved, but the text won't display. If I tab to the field, it does it's
usual highlighting thing, but it's just a big black selection with no text
beneath it. If I manually click on the field, the text will appear. I
think it's a screen updating issue, but it only does it on two of the 6
combo boxes on the screen so I don't know how to go about correcting it.

Any help would be great,
Bodi
 
I found a work around, but I think it's still an MS bug that should be
addressed. If I do a visible=true on the main forms combo, it works, and if
I do a requery() on the subforms combo, that works.

Bodi
 
This is a bug that has been present in Access for at least the last 4
versions. It only happens in combos that have the bound column hidden
(zero-width), and it does seem to be related to the timing of when Access
loads the combo.

You may be able to work around the issue by placing another control so that
it paritally overlaps the combo. Mess with transparency settings, and you
may be able to fool Access into forcing a late screen update, and therefore
have it correctly display.

There is another case where you can actually cause this behaviour in a
continuous form/datasheet. If you programatically limit the combo's
RowSource so it contains only some records, it may display correctly for the
current row, be be blank in other rows. This happens because the relevent
record for the other rows is not in the combo's RowSource, so if the bound
column is zero-width there is quite literally nothing for Access to display
on those rows. In this case the fault is the developer's failure to
understand how the combo's RowSource works, i.e. this is completely
different from the bug cited above.
 
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