VB Forum / General 2 / October 2003

I have defined as part of a personnel system a class called staff which
is very straight forward and works well. However, two elements of the
class are unfortunately not cut and dried. These are the Notes and the
SchedulePreference elements of the class. Notes are for the Personnel
Director. It allows him to record notes about the employee. It may have
no information at all. It may have a few sentences, and for some
employees it can contain volumes. To deal with this, both these two
fields on the database (ACCESS mdb) are defined as memo fields. I think
the problem is now becoming clear. VB does not directly support the
Memo data type. We can of course deal with that by using get chunk and
append chunk.  So, the question becomes how do we define the properties
for “Notes”.  It is not a string. I am assuming the chunk functions are
really passing pointers back and forth, so do we use properties defined
as long or as variant. To further confound the issue, if the length of
the memo is less than 255 characters, is it a string or is it a memo?
And how do we allow for certain methods. For example, within the
definitions of notes,I want to handle a null condition, ie, there are no
notes in which case we do nothing at all.

Currently I’m treating the schedule preference like a string. The notes
I am treating as a variant and since I am still in development mode,
that is not a problem, but I do need a solution. The following are my
property definitions:

Public Property Get Notes() As Variant

If Not IsNull(m_Notes) Then
    Notes = m_Notes.GetChunk(65000)
Else
    Notes = ""
End If
End Property

Public Property Let Notes(ByVal Notes As Variant)

    If Not IsNull(Notes) Then m_Notes.AppendChunk Notes

End Property

Public Property Get SchedulePreference() As String

    SchedulePreference = m_SchedulePreference

End Property

Public Property Let SchedulePreference(ByVal SchedulePreference As String)

    m_SchedulePreference = SchedulePreference

End Property

At this point I really do not know which course of action is the correct
one to take. Comments, suggestions, criticisms are all most welcome.

Thank you,

Robert Berman