Part V: Access and Windows SharePoint Services
1174
Dealing with Compatibility Checker
Problems
Compatibility Checker does a good job of flagging Access 2010 database issues that will cause
problems when publishing the application to SharePoint. Virtually every part of an Access applica-
tion may cause compatibility issues, from a table’s design to the actions in a simple macro.The issues caught by Compatibility Checker are not suggestions for making the application better.
You are required to correct the issues reported by Compatibility Checker; otherwise the publish to
Access Services process will not succeed.Some of the most common problems reported by Compatibility Checker are described in this section.General errors
General errors, by and large, are caused by problems with object names. An object name might
contain punctuation or other illegal characters, or there may be a problem with an object named as
the target of an OpenForm or OpenReport command.For example, as explained in the “Object name violations” section, later in this chapter, there is a
fairly large number of characters that cannot be included in object names. Most of the issues dis-
cussed in this section are easily resolved, while others may require significant work on your part.References to other database objects cannot be the names of client-side objects. For instance, you
can’t have a report that is based on a query that has not been published to SharePoint, and you
can’t have a button on a Web form that opens a report that hasn’t been published to SharePoint.Relationship and lookup errors
Many different types of errors are caused by Access table relationships. Because Access Services
uses a different technique for maintaining relationships between tables than Access itself, many
conventions commonly followed in Access applications do not apply or must be modified to con-
form to SharePoint’s requirements.Incompatible fields
SharePoint supports fewer data types than Access, so fields containing data such as OLE objects
must be handled differently. The only acceptable field data types are Text, Number, Currency, Yes/
No, Date/Time, Calculated field, Attachment, Hyperlink, Memo, and Lookup.Table relationships
Most table relationships in Access Services are based on lookup fields. You may have to convert
some relationships to lookup fields, as described in the “Using Compatibility Checker” section,
earlier in this chapter. Also, the field in the parent table used to populate the lookup in the child
table must be the parent table’s primary key.