Special Edition Using Access 97, Second Edition

Populating a Combo Box from a Recordset

Combo boxes, list boxes, and other bound controls maintain a connection to their underlying Jet tables. Combo boxes create their connection when you open the combo list. List boxes create a connection when you open the form. Neither connection closes until you close the form. Connections to tables create permanent user read locks; updating a table creates a temporary write lock during the update process.

A Jet database has a maximum of 255 concurrent user locks. You seldom, if ever, run out of locks in a single-user environment, but it's quite easy to hit the Jet lock limit with a widely deployed multiuser application that uses combo and list boxes. For example, 50 simultaneous users of the decision-support ...