My Access adventure today was helping work on a problem for a customer where they were getting errors on a form that was bound, and when opened automatically starts writing a default date and time to a record.

The code checks to see if this record becomes valid as the user uses controls to navigate, but basically starts by assuming they are entering a new record.

The problem here was that someone’s database had crashed and never fixed the record or deleted it and so there ended up being an unexpected default record for the user that was in a state that the form was not accounting for.

The workaround was to delete the record (which was very unintuitive for them since they hadn’t entered anything as far as they could tell, they just couldn’t navigate to another record because it said they needed to make the current record valid)

The lesson here is to not start a form in a state where you have a partially formed record. This form will need to be re-programmed to not open any kind of record or create any kind of record until there is at the minimum, some kind of indication that the user actually wants to create a record!