ASP and Access

Unbelievable. I have spent all of today so far just trying to work out why changing my website to use a DSN connection (rather than a DSN-less connection) should cause my website to show blank pages.

Much hacking through code that hasn't seen the light of day for a long time, the addition of lots of test prints and general frustration eventually led to the discovery that certain fields were not be retrieved from the database in DSN mode. WTF?! No matter what I did the missing fields would not come back from the database. Then, while looking at the table in Access I eventually found that the missing fields were Memo fields. Could that be the problem?

I hastily backed up the table in question, and then changed the memo fields to strings (cropping all my data to 255 characters, hence the backup) and found that suddenly the fields were appearing again.

A bit of searching on Google and I found this It would seem that Access's Memo fields are one big hack, and only work in certain circumstances and can be very unpredictable in other situations.

And how to fix the problem? By the addition of one line of code:

RS.CursorLocation = adUseClient

An entire morning just to find that. My god.