Solved Issue with removing ActiveX Controls from Legacy Access Apps (1 Viewer)

[spaLOGICng]

Hi All,

I have a weird conundrum that I have never encountered before. I am hopng that one of you may have some experience with this and what your solution was.

I have a client that has upgraded several Computers and M365 Office to 64-bit. They have a legacy application that began in Access 2003 and is heavily laden with ActiveX Controls, i.e. Flex Grid, Calendar, and others purchased from a 3rd party.

The conundrum is I am unable to delete the ActiveX Controls from the physically or programmatically.

I know the best solution would be to recreate the Forms copying everything but the ActiveX Controls, but I am wondering if any of you have encountered this and what your solution was.

Many Thanks!

 

[tvanstiphout]

The simplest thing to do is uninstall O-64 and install O-32. The actual use cases for 64-bit are few and far between. Bigger is not always better.

Presumably these ActiveX controls performed a function, so wholesale removing them will break the app in many places.

"I am unable to delete the ActiveX Controls from the physically or programmatically.": a word is missing in front of "physically". Probably "forms".
Assuming "forms", what did you try, and what exactly is not working? Typically you just select the control in design view, and hit Delete key.

Worst case you can export the forms to text files (Application.SaveAsText), and delete from there.

 

[spaLOGICng]

The simplest thing to do is uninstall O-64 and install O-32. The actual use cases for 64-bit are few and far between. Bigger is not always better.

Presumably these ActiveX controls performed a function, so wholesale removing them will break the app in many places.

"I am unable to delete the ActiveX Controls from the physically or programmatically.": a word is missing in front of "physically". Probably "forms".
Assuming "forms", what did you try, and what exactly is not working? Typically you just select the control in design view, and hit Delete key.

Worst case you can export the forms to text files (Application.SaveAsText), and delete from there.

The Client does not want to uninstall O-64 for O-32. already suggested that.

There is a 3rd party ActiveX Control, its TLB and DLL that will not install. It requires a Password and the original company that developed the application has gone out of business. The Company that purchased it will not honor the agreement for lifetime support.

Yes, typically that is how one would delete a control. As I said, I tried to do so both physically and programmatically, neither worked.

The Owner of this Application has already moved on to new technologies and only wants to utilize the CRM piece of the application. So, I am just laboring to trim it down.

I have resolved to just re-create the Screens less the ActiveX Controls.

Thanks!

 

[isladogs]

Flexgrid and the old calendar do not work in 64-bit Access You can easily replace the old calendar control with an alternative that does work in 64-bit. Replacing the functionality of Flexgrid may be much more challenging

 

[Pat Hartman]

If you have 32 bit office installed on your own PC, copy the database and do the surgery there. It is very annoying that 64 bit Access will not allow you to delete these objects and good to know for future reference.

It must be a MS thing. I once ran into a problem that forced me to format c: to get rid of MS software. Luckily it was my laptop Somehow, don't ask me how because I make it a policy to never install trials, I managed to get a trial version of SQL Server installed on my laptop and it expired. There was no obvious uninstall so I just started uninstalling components. Don't ever do that. Big mistake. At some point in the uninstall process, I ran into a piece that refused to uninstall because some other piece was not installed. I tried to reinstall but I couldn't reinstall because some different piece was already installed. So I couldn't uninstall because of x and I couldn't reinstall because of y and repair wouldn't work because of n. Everything was connected to something. So, I ended up wiping the entire hard drive. It only took 6 hours to rebuild it

You know that policy of not installing trials. I broke it a few days ago and I'm going to pay again. This time it's my main system. I installed a tool from RedGate. It had options to "add in" to SSMS and I said NO, NO , a thousand times NO. Did the software listen. NOPE. It installed itself into SSMS and I'm sure that will cost me dearly.

 

[spaLOGICng]

Flexgrid and the old calendar do not work in 64-bit Access You can easily replace the old calendar control with an alternative that does work in 64-bit. Replacing the functionality of Flexgrid may be much more challenging

Sorry for the delayed response... super busy.

Yes, I understand that (some) ActiveX controls are not compatible with 64-bit Access. I say some because the Tree Control is. Anyway, the issues was while trying to delete them. I just could not delete them. I would select the control and press delete.... I would right click on the control and select delete from the popup... I even write a short VBA proc to delete them.... I just could not delete them. I had also done just enough work in the application that I could not open it in v 2010 or 2007. I did not think to roll back my installation version on my laptop to 32-bit..... but all is in the past now.

There were literally several hundred occurrences of the ActiveX Date Control and over a thousand occurrences of a 3rd party ActiveX Time Spinner Control.

How did I overcome the issue? I created a Procedure to replicate the Screen, control for control, and when it encountered the Date and Time Controls, I simply created Text and Combo Boxes in their place, that called database Functions that performed most of the logic that sat behind the ActiveX Controls.

As for the Flex Grids, fortunately there were only a few of those and the client did not use them, so I omitted them from my script.

 

[Pat Hartman]

That was very clever. Someone will likely ask you to post the code.

Another solution would be to export all the forms to text and then delete the reference to the ActiveX control from the text file and reimport into a new db. Once you figured out what text needed to be deleted, you might be able to automate this also if you have a lot of forms to fix.

 

[Jason Lee Hayes]

Send me the file(s) that are password protected, i will remove the password requirement and post back foc. Only the Dynamic link library and associate files no personal data or MDB needed..