4GuysFromRolla.com : ASP FAQS : Databases, General

My memo fields show up as blank! OR When I test my memo field for a value and then try to show it only if it is not blank [or only if it contains some string or or or], then when I display it I get nothing!

SELECT fld1, fld2, ... memoFld FROM table ...

instead of simply

SELECT * FROM table ...

And then you *must* copy the memo field to a VBS variable and thereafter use the variable, thus:

theText = RS("memoFld") If Trim(theText) = "" Then     ... Else     Response.Write theText     ... End If

Do you see it? If you had coded Response.Write("memoFld") in both of the places I used the theText variable there, the second time you would always get a null value!!!

Another set of rules

Thanks to user "Stacy" for these rules!

Stacy has verified that they work in all the following combinations. We invite you to try them on your system and report the results:
Access - using a System DSN
Access - using ODBC Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb) and a DSN-less connection
Access - using Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 and a DSN-less connection
SQL Server 2000 - using a System DSN
SQL Server 2000 - using ODBC Driver={SQL Server} and a DSN-less connection
SQL Server 2000 - using OLE DB Provider=SQLOLEDB and a DSN-less connection

And the technique is simple:
Rule 1: Be sure to use ADODB.RecordSet.Open to create the recordset object. (That is, do not use ADODB.Connection.Execute or ADODB.Command.Execute!)
Rule 2: Set the cursor location to the client.
Rule 3: Use adOpenKeyset as the open mode for the recordset.

So, in code:

Set RS = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.RecordSet") RS.CursorLocation = adUseClient RS.Open table_name_or_sql_query, your_connection_object, adOpenKeyset

Stacy reports that if you do this, you no longer have to worry about the order of the fields or the other restrictions noted above.