Access fills in blank fields

[GolfingTitan116]

Hello.

I'm new to Access but learning quick. I have several dropdowns on my Form, which I want to be blank when end user opens the form. So I set the Default Value to blank, but for some reason, when you fill in any other field in the form, it populates those dropdowns with "No".

Here you can see the form without typing anything in:

Here, as soon as I fill in the Due Date, the drop downs to the right populate with "No":

Any idea why this would be happening?

 

[johnny51981]

How are those 2 drop downs set up in both the form and the table that they are being fed to/from?

I suspect that your Date Requested is defaulted to the current date, so it doesn't create the record in the table until you populated the Due Date, at which is when you see the two "No" populations.

 

[GolfingTitan116]

So, both dropdowns were created the same, so I'll just focus on the one.

The first image is from the table... the 2nd is from the form.

Again, I'm learning Access, so I'm not sure if that's the information you need. Please let me know if you need anything else and thanks for the help!

 

[johnny51981]

I believe the Yes/No data type won't allow for a null once the record is established. So you will want to create the field in the table as a Short Text, and then add some pieces to the Lookup tab (you have that tab displayed on your first screenshot):

 

[GolfingTitan116]

Great idea... thank you!

 

[Micron]

If not using the table design options, true false, yes no, on off fields should be integer, not text. Use values of -1,0 (T/F)
You should be able to delete yes no field so I'm thinking that claim is incorrect. Besides, the 2nd pic shows the use of a table level lookup field, which is a different animal. Seasoned developers will tell you to not use them (nor spaces, special characters in object names, which you are doing). Exception is underscore.
Also not a good idea to use attachment fields - you can quickly reach db size limit.
Code could be causing your issue but I've no idea if you have any.

 

[GolfingTitan116]

If not using the table design options, true false, yes no, on off fields should be integer, not text. Use values of -1,0 (T/F)
You should be able to delete yes no field so I'm thinking that claim is incorrect. Besides, the 2nd pic shows the use of a table level lookup field, which is a different animal. Seasoned developers will tell you to not use them (nor spaces, special characters in object names, which you are doing). Exception is underscore.
Also not a good idea to use attachment fields - you can quickly reach db size limit.
Code could be causing your issue but I've no idea if you have any.

No, no code at all. Way too new to Access to try that.

 

[Micron]

You probably should research normalization, then. I suspect you will be influenced by your Excel thinking, which will not be good. One thing I see is that if you have a user/employee table, you're storing their names in that table instead of their related primary key value. Your table pic showed no evidence of a lookup field so I don't understand how that came into the picture. You've accepted that as a solution even though you shouldn't use them.

 

[GolfingTitan116]

Okay, so make them integer and use the -1/0?

 

[Micron]

This is where I'm coming from. A bit old looking, but Allan was an absolute Access guru. Sadly, he's no longer working in Access.

Microsoft Access tips: Code accompanying article - Has the record been printed?

A workaround for a bug where Microsoft Access crashes or fails to execute queries with Yes/No fields.

allenbrowne.com

See what you think. Perhaps a good idea to bookmark his site or some of its topics.
The potential issue you could run into with "Yes" is that it's text and in some cases, you'd have to convert "Yes" to boolean data type in order to use it. For a simple query it should be ok though. Just saying you might want to consider the suggestion rather than have "yes" in some cases and booleans or numbers in other cases. I'm still not understanding how this fits in with lookup fields.