Today’s adventure in Access was a problem my customer was having with an imported file. Their shipment requests were being supplied via electronic delivery and then they send a confirmation via the same electronic delivery system.

The recipient of the shipments asked my customer to change all their shipments that they made this week to the following week, but they didn’t send them a new electronic document with the new dates.

My handler (the customer person who was asking me to do something) thought that the shipping department was only using the original recipient request instead of their recipient receipt. (Assumption 1)

The handler requested that I update the code to ask for a new date for these shipments when importing into the internal systems. I wanted to verify the files I was dealing with were the correct ones and also where I would need to add the code.

I found where the date was being imported from by line number and field so I could check the file manually.

The handler and I called Barb, the shipping person who entered the receipts, who was updating the dates manually, and we discovered in the file that we were actually importing the file creation date rather than the actual shipped date that was correctly being updated.

My customer had been having this problem when this would happen for 5 years. The solution took me about 5 minutes to code, and we spent about an hour researching the issue so I could change the right bits.

The customer was very happy. Yay me! I love to get wins for the team.

The moral of the story is always go back to the roots of problems and work them all the way through. My handler would have had me coding solutions that would never have worked and would have made the situation worse.