I use an SVN server to store versioning information for all my Access work that I do.

A shout out to the OASISsvn Access Add In and TortoiseSVN for Windows which are two pieces of software I use daily in my Access versioning work.

How it saved by butt today: I had a bug that seemed to have been introduced today but I could not figure it out. I was spending a lot of time working on it and moving step by step through the code to find the bug. Basically a new record was getting saved instead of being discarded which was really confusing my code. When you navigate to an existing record from a new record it should discard the changes if none had been made.

After spending too much time trying to figure it out, I was able to quickly load the old form code back in from the previous commit and see that it was indeed working in the previous version.

Then I was able to look at each change that was made in the particular form. There were about 5 places I changed the code, and sure enough, I found a spot where a field was ALWAYS being updated, even when there was a brand new record that hadn’t been edited yet. This was enough to make Access automatically save the record when I navigated away using a recordset Bookmark without initializing the fields once they start making edits.

Thankfully, once I had decided to use my versioning system to look at the code I changed it only took me about 10 minutes to find it, fix it, and test it

Woo-hoo! Go versioning. Seriously, everyone should learn how to use it if they aren’t already. I have a few articles about versioning already:

Access JumpStart search for “source control”

Also try searching for versioning and subversion and SVN.