Control Removed From Collection

[david.rougier]

Hi everyone,

The development team in my company meets a stange bug for few days while executing a VB6 project.
My program is linked to a PostgreSQL database via an ODBC connection.
Here is the procedure I follow to reproduce the bug :

1. I open a form. The form is identified with the code FRM-1 in this procedure.
   Here are some features of FRM-1 :
   
   • It contains a tabbed control.
   • It contains collections of controls.
     The collections lblEtiquette and cmdListe are ones of them.
     The controls of these two collections are not all located on the same tab.
     We created collections of controls in most of forms in our VB6 project to limit the number of identifiers.
   
   
2. I close FRM-1.
   
3. I open FRM-1 again but now the controls indexed at 9 in the lblEtiquette and cmdListe collections are missing [BUG].

We consider the fact at step 3 as a bug because of the following reasons :

• The program never adds or removes controls in collections during its execution.
• The procedure does not raise the bug everytime.

I do not expect a miracle solution to this bug.
I suspect this bug to come either from the PostgreSQL driver or from the VB6 limit of identifiers.
Does anyone have ever experimented this kind of bug ?

We reached the VB6 limit of identifiers few months ago.
We renamed some entities within the project but now we can only add 11 new identifiers.
That is why I suspect the limit of identifiers as a possible cause for the bug.

Thanks in advance for your future help and advices

[Hack]

I have no idea what you mean by identifier. What VB6 limit of "identifers" have you met?

[RhinoBull]

It appears that you have Control Array rather than Collection (although form object exposes controls collection via property).

How does each control array get loaded?
Was lblEtiquette(9) created at design or runtime?
Do you assign Container to each control if created at runtime?
Check Tab_Click event (or whatever applies) to see what's going on when user changes tabs.
I would search (within the code) for Load and/or Unload to see how controls are loaded/unloaded.

etc... but please answer those queues first.

[david.rougier]

For Hack :

I have no idea what you mean by identifier. What VB6 limit of "identifers" have you met?

Project Limitations

A single project can contain up to 32,000 "identifiers" (any nonreserved keyword), which include, but are not limited to, forms, controls, modules, variables, constants, procedures, functions, and objects. Note that the actual number of identifiers is limited to available memory.

For RhinoBull :

How does each control array get loaded?

Each control array has been created at design time so they get loaded when the container form gets loaded.

Was lblEtiquette(9) created at design or runtime?

lblEtiquette(9) was created at design time. The program corresponding to the VB6 project never adds or removes controls at runtime. But sometimes it makes controls visible or not.

Check Tab_Click event (or whatever applies) to see what's going on when user changes tabs.
I would search (within the code) for Load and/or Unload to see how controls are loaded/unloaded.

I tried to debug within event routines but each time the bug does not raise.
I do not think that event debugging is reliable in VB6.

Then I wrote "Debug.Print" statements inside some event routines such as : Form_Load, Form_Unload, event routines offered by the tabbed control, ...
The "Debug.Print" statements depended on the following test :

If (lblEtiquette(9) Is Nothing) Then

Unfortunately the bug does not raise again.