I'm wondering how safe the code is that is in the Access Code Archive? Is it validated and considered safe or should I read through the code to ensure it is okay? I'm looking at the http://www.UtterAccess.com/forum/Who-s-Log...n-t1897146.html utility right now.

JK

I am pretty sure that the UA mods go through any samples before they are approved so they will have at least been glanced over. That doesn't mean someone couldn't have really hidden something away and it was missed but I would highly doubt that any of the people who regularly post here and have submitted something have any interest in posting dodgy code.

JK,

In the earlier years of UA's lifespan, stuff in the Code Archive had to go through a brief vetting process, if memory serves. But the intention was mostly to make sure it didn't have any glaring mistakes or wrong assumptions. If, by "safe", you're referring to the code being "virus free" or some equivalent, you can rest assured that something like that would be glaringly obvious to most of the VIPs here, and would be dealt with accordingly. I think it's safe to say you don't have to worry about some temperature conversion function installing some sort of credit card stealing software.

Having said that, it's always a good idea to look through code before using it - if only to help you to understand how it works. If you blindly copy/paste code from any website without taking any time to try to understand it, you're not really learning anything. Who knows? The code you find may be 95% of what you need, and you may need to tweak the code that extra 5% to make the code REALLY useful to your particular needs. UA doesn't exist to be a storehouse of plug-and-play functions and subroutines. We're here to help you become a better database programmer.

So, by all means, read through the code, and trace how it does what it does. If you have any worries or questions, post a thread with a link to the code thread in question, and we'll try to help you out.

Hope this helps,

Dennis

JK,

We try to ensure all code functions as stated.
Having said that I myself still scan the downloads for virus's and view the code before employing it.
Never ever use your original database to add modules add ins etc .
Always use a copy of your original database to test them out on.

Always backup,backup,backup .... I can't say this enough.

(for access 2007 and later)

Also, this is also where trust center can be a good thing - you can open it and NOT enable the content. You can thus safely browse the content, including the code and therefore see for yourself whether it's going to try and take your creditcard number. Until it's enabled, it can't run arbitrary code like that.

Thank you everyone. I was able to download the code I listed above and I did read through much of it. You are exactly right too, I had to make a couple of tweaks to it to get it to work just right. Adding that last 5% makes it work great for my environment.

JK

Glad you got it working in your environment.

Most of the Items in the Code Archives are not a plug and play type of scenario, they are mostly demo's to show you it can be done and one way of doing it.
Most of the time they require minor tweaking to work in your environment as you have discovered.

Yea it ended up being pretty nice. I don't have permissions to see which users are accessing the records but I can grab their machine name. From there I added a lookup table which contains a census of the database users. The lookup table has the machine name and the person's name and phone. Then I modified the query to link via host name and dropped the person's name in the correct field of the form. A nice little work around! Thanks again for the help.

JK

Glad we could help you out, that is what this site is all about.