Recover a Deleted Form

[Mac R]

Unbelievably stupid on my part... I am about 99.9% sure I know the answer to this, but I thought I might as well ask...



This morning, I am merrily coding away on a form that does the lion's share of the work for the app I'm developing. There is a lot wrapped around this form. In code, I do a lot of record adds and deletes depending on what the user wants to accomplish. In the code, whilst this record manipulation is being done, I turn off warnings so the user does not see the append, update or delete messages from Access. If my code 'breaks' there is always the possibility that Warning are OFF after the break. That happened to me this morning, and I did the fix, exited the debugger, closed and saved the form, then right clicked on it to open it again in design and inadvertently clicked on delete. *POOF* - form is gone. My backup is about 12 hours old, and missing two days worth of modifications.

Y'know my question... I still have Acc2013 open... I have not closed the dB. Is there anyway to recover the form?

[Mac R]

I've been surfing, and found this in a post on this forum where someone deleted a table and used this function to recover it (I ass-u-me). I'm not finding something similar to this with respect to a FORM, but maybe someone out there knows?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/off...rom-a-database

[orange]

Mac R,

I tried the recoverTable code you pointed to and it worked fine.
I have had no luck finding a recoverForm.
I have copied a form, renamed it, deleted it and then looped thru all forms trying to find 1 with name "~tmp" or just "~" but get nothing. Not sure how a deleted (but not purged) form is identified.

[Mac R]

Orange,

Much appreciated... <<sigh>> I might just have to re-create about 5 hours of work... Luckily, a lot of it deals with opening additional forms which are NOT deleted, and uses new fields from related tables which are also intact, so now all I have to do is try and remember my logic stream on getting to where I was. As stated... I know better than not to back up prior to modification, but for some reason I didn't get it done this ayem... My bad entirely. Thanks for your efforts...

[isladogs]

Deleted tables can indeed be recovered whilst the database is still open and hasn't been compacted.
However, normally its not possible to recover forms unless you can see an item in the VBE listed as Form_~TMPCLP....
If so, it MAY be possible by modifying methods used in this article Removed deleted objects (isladogs.co.uk)

[orange]

Mac R,
When I delete the copy I made, the warning message says if you delete the form, it can not be recovered.
You can SaveAsText and restore a form, but of course --once it is deleted,it's too late.
Probably better to save your work frequently; backup regularly...
But we've all been bitten to one degree or another.

Good luck.

[CJ_London]

No idea if the following will work

you can do a search of msysObjects to see if it is still there in some form - code along the lines

SELECT *
FROM msysObjects
WHERE [Type]=-32768 and [Name] like '*' & [Enter form name] & '*'

if you see your form name there - perhaps with a ~ prefix or similar, copy the name in full then in the vba immediate window type

?docmd.OpenForm "",acDesign

and paste the form name between the double quotes

then press return

with a bit of luck you will get your form back.

Edit - so similar to Colin's suggestion but looks like you need to modify the sql above to look for '~TMPCLP*'

[Mac R]

Hey Isladogs...

Nope... sadly NO ~TMPCLP listed in the forms collection or in MSysObjects anywhere... there are references to the form name (sort of), but none with a TMPCLP associated to the name.

Thanks for the effort...

[Mac R]

Appreciate the effort and time, Ajax...

Form Name: f_recipes_single_item_display

Select Query Used:
SELECT MSysObjects.Name, MSysObjects.Type
FROM MSysObjects
WHERE MSysObjects.Name Like '~TMPCLP*'
ORDER BY MSysObjects.Name;

Sadly, the output to the select query you provided doesn't produce anything with that form name in it. Here is all it produces...



I modified the query to
SELECT MSysObjects.Name, MSysObjects.Type
FROM MSysObjects
WHERE MSysObjects.Name Like '*recipe_single_item_display*'
ORDER BY MSysObjects.Name;

to see if anything interesting popped up, and got...



but these look like references to controls on the form, not the form itself.

Walking down a path with no end I fear...

Thanks,

[Mac R]

Thanks, Orange... yeah, bitten! :^0

[orange]

Ajax,

I tried your suggestion. When I did the copy and rename, I can see the form name in the MSysObjects. But when I delete the form, the MSysObjects record shows up immediately as DELETED. I did not see any temp type name.

[CJ_London]

wasn't sure it would work

but these look like references to controls on the form

they are - sql to listbox, combo and subform row/recordsource. But you wouldn't edit them as a query, only through the form

[Mac R]

ALL~

I think I'm at the end of my search here and the only course of action left to me is importing the form from the backup I have, and re-doing the stuff lost between yesterday and today.

A lesson learned (yet again). BACK UP FREQUENTLY!!!!!!

This is a great place, and I really appreciate the effort everyone put forth trying to solve my issue. I hope I can help someone here, someday.

Thanks again!

[Micron]

I think that the real lessons to be learned here are
- don't turn off warnings; learn to use Execute method
- if you must turn off warnings, you MUST have an error handler that will turn them back on.
- to a lesser degree, one could open the form first then switch views as there is no delete choice on the view menu.

What seems interesting is how you could accidentally choose delete because in my version, delete is near the bottom of the menu while the views are near the top.

[Mac R]

Hey Micron...

I am unclear what you are referring to re: the Execute Method. Can you enlighten, or point me in a direction?

re: error handler, agreed. pobody's nerfect... and I proved it this morning. I constantly have to tell myself to slow down, and do it right.

As for position, you're guess is as good as mine, all I remember is a flash and the form was gone... maybe I clicked, held and dragged for a micro-second. I dunno...



But thanks for the insight.