Entry

How do I work around the 255 character limitation with Access ADO

Jul 26th, 2001 18:18
Steve Herold, Sam Rosenberg, http://www.deja.com/usenet

In some cases, fields in an Access database will be truncated to 255 
characters if accessed through ADO in your web page.  This is a 
Microsoft bug, and generally occurs if your SQL statement is too 
complex (i.e. joins, multiple field returns, etc.)

For example:

select distinct i.ref, i.cdname, i.name, i.address, i.desc from appcd 
cd, internet i, Datasource ds where cd.info_cat = 'cat1' and cd.cdname 
= i.cdname and cd.cdname = ds.cdname order by i.name

You get the picture.  Since this is a fairly complex SQL request, if 
any of the fields requested was a Memo field, it would probably be 
truncated.

A good workaround is to create a separate select statement for the Memo 
fields only, with no joins:

select distinct i.ref, i.foo, i.bar, i.hum from cddoo cd, internet i, 
Datasource ds where cd.gor = 'gor2' and cd. = i.cdname and cd.cdname = 
ds.cdname order by i.name

set key = rs("ref")

select desc from internet where ref = "key"


Voila! No truncation.


I've been using memo fields in Access with ADO for months without any 
problems. Some of this is documented in MS's Knowledge Base...but some 
general rules should be
1.  When doing an select alway place the memo field as the last field 
in the list.
2.  When doing an insert or update alway place the memo field as the 
last field in the list.

Steve