Flow – I.rootGraph.getNode(…) is Undefined

The more I work with Power Automate, and Flow in particular, the more I love and hate it at the same time.

When it works, it is exceptional!

The issue is that it doesn’t always work. I’d even go as far to say, that from my perspective they are unreliable.

I have nightly flows that typically run for 2-3 minutes (running for months and month now) and every once and a while, suddenly, out of the blue, they take 35-45 minutes and timeout never successfully running. Now nothing ever changes at my end, so it is a Microsoft/environment thing.

I have a Flow to log in-going and out-going e-mails into a central database. I’ve seen multiple instances where, for some unknown reason, a few sporadic e-mails don’t get logged?! All you get is a ‘Bad Gateway’ error with no actionable information. We also recently experienced a period of a couple minutes where every e-mail was not logged, so a guess a service failure.

Today, trying to update a Flow, I ran into a new issue. I searched online and found not a single post on the subject, so I thought I’d share my knowledge on the subject (which isn’t much). I was actively editing a Flow, trying to move an action and paste from my Clipboard and received the following error.

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Wanna Try Azure SQL Database For Free!!!

I recently came across an announcement from Microsoft and thought I’d share it here.

It would seem that Microsoft has finally made it possible for anyone to try out Azure SQL Database and even perform development for free!

You can read all the details at:

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OLE Object Data Type – Just Don’t Ever Do It!

I know I’ve made posts in the past regarding not using attachments

Adding Attachments to an Access Database

When Access 2007 came out Microsoft introduced a new Attachment data type to allow users to insert attachments within their databases. I urge you to NEVER use Attachment data types for a variety of reasons, but mainly: Leads to database bloating Can impact performance You need code to interact and extract the attachments from the database Instead, the tried and tested approach of simply storing the file path and filename (with the extension) remains the preferred technique to use.

but in case it wasn’t clear in that post let me extend the advice to include ANY embedding of files within a database by ANY means. Thus, please, please, please, NEVER use the OLE Object data type to save files within a database!

It always seems like a brilliant plan at the time, but I PROMISE you that it will nip you in the ass down the road!

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Access FormatConditions Object For Each Iteration Is Incorrect

Have you ever needed to work with Conditional Formatting via VBA and tried to iterate through the FormatConditions collection?! Did you get incomplete results? Well, there is apparently a serious bug depending on the approach taken.

Note, this applies to Access 2016 and earlier, and per Karl’s comment below, has since been addressed in latter versions.

That being said, Microsoft did not push a fix for this bug to earlier versions. Thus, the workaround solution still remains the sole universal solution that will work properly on all versions of Access and as such, is the approach I recommend developers use.

The easiest approach to iterating over the collection is to do something like the following which is to iterate over the FormatConditions object:

Dim oFC As FormatCondition
Dim i As Long

For Each oFC In Me.FirstName.FormatConditions
    i = i + 1
    Debug.Print i, oFC.Expression1
Next oFC

Yet, this will fail to list more than 3 Format Conditions! Yep, you read that right. It will not necessarily list all the conditions. Making it worse, is I found no mention of this in the documentation (see below – maybe I missed it?!).

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MAJOR Changes Coming To Microsoft Outlook

If you haven’t already heard, there are some MAJOR changes coming to Microsoft Outlook. We will be getting a new ‘Outlook for Windows’ (2+ years out according to the video, but already available for opt-in testing) which will be replacing the existing mail apps (Mail, Outlook, Web Outlook, …). Some are also referring to it as ‘New Outlook’.

Karl Donaubauer made a post which explains what we know so far:

The New Outlook and Access/VBA

Microsoft is currently working on the so-called New Outlook that is no longer based on COM. This means that the traditional object model, the programmability and the automation of Outlook from other Windows applications such as Access will be lost. But one after the other: What? Microsoft had been a…

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Access Modern Web Browser Control – Image Editor

So in a previous post:

Access Modern Web Browser Control – Image Cropping

I lied. I’ll be the first to admit it. In my post I said I was done with the Modern Web Browser control. Apparently not! So I was doing some house cleaning and came across a project I had developed several years back, but wouldn’t work because the old web browser control didn’t support HTML canvas elements and I had shelved it.

I demonstrated how one could easily integrate the means to crop images. This was fine and works very well.

That said, I wanted to push things further. I know that quite often, I need to do a little more than just crop an image. I don’t need a full blown editor like Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net, … but I do need the ability to resize, crop, insert some text and a few other simple things (from time to time).

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do all of this in Access directly and no longer need 3rd party applications, or ActiveX controls? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a seamlessly integrated full fledged image editor in a Microsoft Access form!

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Access Modern Web Browser Control – Dynamic Content

I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with the Modern Web Browser control and specifically trying to dynamically render content. My most recent adventure relating to this allowed me to finally finish a project I had tried developing years earlier, but was limited by the ‘original’ Web Browser control’s functionality (or lack thereof):

Access Modern Web Browser Control – Image Cropping

I lied. I’ll be the first to admit it. In my post I said I was done with the Modern Web Browser control. Apparently not! So I was doing some house cleaning and cam across a project I had developed several years back, but wouldn’t work because the old web browser control didn’t support HTML canvas elements and I had shelved it.

Once again, Microsoft has no documentation whatsoever on this aspect of programming the Modern Web Browser control! So this was a massive trial and error type of development and being too stubborn to give up, I eventually found a way. What is nice here is the fact that the final solution is very straightforward (although getting there was not).

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Access Modern Web Browser Control – Image Cropping

I lied. I’ll be the first to admit it. In my post

Access Modern Web Browser Control – End Of The Road

I just wanted to state that I most probably won’t be pursuing any more development using the new ‘Modern’ Web Browser control for a little while. I’ve:

I said I was done with the Modern Web Browser control. Apparently not!

So I was doing some house cleaning and came across a project I had developed several years back, but wouldn’t work because the old web browser control didn’t support HTML canvas elements and I had shelved it.

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Modern Web Browser control – No Absolute Media Paths

Oh what a fun couple of hours I’ve had trying to revive a project I had started using the old Web Browser control and was trying to convert to use the Modern Web Browser control.

I did find, yet another, limitation when trying to dynamically populate the Modern Web Browser control!

It would seem that you cannot use absolute paths.

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Access 32-bit Is Getting Large Address Aware (LAA)

It would seem that Microsoft has finally decided to make Access 32-bit Large Address Aware (LAA) thus enabling it to access 4GB of memory rather than just 2GB, if we can believe the updated roadmap:

Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365

The Microsoft 365 Roadmap lists updates that are currently planned for applicable subscribers. Check here for more information on the status of new features and updates.

It’s taken years! I can trace back a suggestion on UserVoice (remember that) from 2017 (6 years!) that had over 300 votes (that’s HUGE in terms of Access requests)!!! And there had been requests circulating even before that.

As they say, better late than never.

Does Not Change The 2GB Max File Size!

Note that this is an increase in allowable/accessible virtual memory available to the msaccess.exe process to perform operations (queries, …). It in no way changes the maximum allowable database file size of 2GB. That remains, as is, unchanged!

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