VB Forum / General / August 2004

Ack.  First, please don't post using HTML. Use Plain Text, please.

Second, if your "Code" is as simple as "A", "B", "C", etc. then you could
get the ASCII value (which is numeric) and store that in ItemData.  Then,
use Chr$() to get it back to the character. This would be a best-case
scenario.

Other than that, your only other option (that I know of) is to create a
parallel array and keep that array in sync with the combobox.  IOW, the
array elements would store the Code and the array's indexes would correspond
to the combobox's indexes for items.

Utimately, this all boils down to a database design issue. I assume Code is
a primary key.  It's really rather rare that a primary key should be a text
field because it's common and convenient to store a primary key in ItemData
(for obvious reasons).  If you can change the Code field in the database to
be numeric, I think you'd be much better off.  But, sometimes, you have to
work with what you've got; perhaps because making such a change to the table
would mean re-writing a lot of code. But even if you did need to re-write a
fair amount of code, it might be worth it. Only you (maybe with a DBA's
assistance) can determine that.

Mike

Hello everyone,

I have some tables in a jet database that I would like to use to populate
some combobox controls in my application, but the tables contain a single
character index and a description, rather than a numeric index.  This
presents a problem since .itemdata only supports numeric information about
list items.  One of my tables might look like:

Code        Desc
A           Alpha
B           Beta
C           Charlie

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I might make both populating the
combobox and updating from/storing to the database work?  All of the example
code I can find assumes you have a numeric index to work with.

Any and all help is appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
JJ