Solutions for Complex Access form.

[Royce]

I have a form with 47 subForms, and Form.Controls.count is 351. The sub forms were originally text boxes, which got changed to ListBoxes because of customer requests, then to subforms because of conditional formatting needs that the customer wanted. Now, when it is open, other forms give sporadic "System Resources Exceeded" errors. I'm pretty sure it is this form that is causing the errors, as it is always open when they occur. (Only consistent factor.) Task Manger - Processes shows that closing this form releases 723 "User Objects", and almost 400 GDI objects.

Is it time to switch to a different development tool? Visual Basic? C++. Is it possible to rewrite the single form as a standalone and keep using the rest of the Access App? (Almost 60,000 loc in 200 objects.)

 

[MarkK]

Or maybe it's time to study the work-flow and make leaner, simpler ways to accomplish specific tasks. Why does a monster form, for instance, need to be open all the time? If other forms are open, presumably people are using them, and then what of the forms they are not using? Why are they open?

It's a newby thing to make huge user-interfaces. Work-flow is not that clear or well-understood, so you provide a user-interface that tries to be all things to all users. The pitfall is that it doesn't scale up well. What are the exact processes people perform? For each task, what do they really need?

What are your three most commonly performed tasks? Write a wizard for each one that completely bypasses your UI. Now, what's left?

Just a few thoughts . . .