During my development, over the past two years of getting started with Access again, I’ve often found two instances of a .accdb running at the same time. I only find this by looking at the taskbar icon, and seeing two there. Often I can’t recall how this happened exactly, as there were often crashes while testing code. Because I’m developing on a non-split .accdb, I expect and have had various problems.
Anyways, I found I could do this on purpose, by just starting Access twice (not double clicking on a .accdb file) and choosing the same .accdb file. Some have reported that users have done this, and crashed the .accdb and contaminated data. Indeed, I’ve read that everyone should have their own local .accdb file and not use one found on a network drive. However, the posters that had corruption weren’t clear if the user that opened two instances of the same .accdb were using a split database or not. So, I’m a bit unclear if there could be a problem opening the same .accdb on the FE workstation if they are linked to a BE.
The potential problem I see is if deep in the workings of Access one open FE could contaminate the environment of the other running FE. We know from my previous posts that MS wasn’t careful to isolate workspaces as two forms with procedures calling a separate module procedure can stomp all over each other’s declared module variables.
The reason I understand that users would open two FE is if they are needing to view something different in the db (i.e. based on an incoming phone support call) and don’t want to close what they already have open. Instances of forms were supposed to take care of this, but as I showed in other postings, again MS didn’t do a good job with isolating and controlling multiple instances of workspace in this situation either, it’s full of bugs and improper code execution paths. On top of that, you might have to consider two different Windows accounts (users) could open the .accdb independently. Does each need their own .accdb and not use one FE from a common folder on the workstation?
So, is there a problem with two FEs open at the same time, on the same workstation, against one (or more) BE?
If so, I looked and didn’t find an elegant solution for testing if the .accdb is already open on the same workstation. There was one that suggested testing for the .lccdb, but that has limitations too. One has to consider that user A has the .accdb open, while user B in another Windows account might open the same FE .accdx file.