Eliminating Magic Numbers in VBA with George Hepworth

Please join us for our Monthly Chapter Presentation , at 6:30PM Pacific (UTC -8)

Moved to accommodate Geoffrey L Griffith’s follow up presentation on Com Add-ins in January.

Eliminating “Magic Numbers”

If you’ve ever taken over an existing Access Relational Database Application, you might have encountered this problem. You find code with numbers like this:

lngPublisherID = Nz(.cboPublisher, 60)

What does 60 mean? Where did 60 come from? Why isn’t it 0? What did the original developer mean?

Compare that to this version:

lngPublisherID = Nz(.cboPublisher, enuDefaults.defPublisher)

And the light comes on. 60 is the Primary Key of the default Publisher assigned when the actual Publisher is unknown.

Replacing “Magic Numbers” is a self-documenting way to make your code more accessible to the next developer who looks at your code.

I’ll provide examples of places where I’ve found it relatively quick and easy to improve code with self-documenting alternatives to Magic Numbers.

In addition to Enums, I’ll introduce an class-based approach. Yes, after all these years, I’m finally getting my feet wet with Classes in VBA.

Bring to the meeting your own examples and ideas about making code more readable and understandable.

Access Pacific holds FREE Q&A webinars the First Thursday of every month, from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm Pacific.

AUG Access Pacific Calendar .ics file

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