Combo Box Woes With Conditional Formatting

i am using a2k.

to make things simple, let's say i have a combobox (cbx) on my form as a bound control to an underlying table. the control source and name of the control is 'Cycle'. it's defined as a 'byte' number on the table's design and gets filled in by the user from a l/u table having the values 0,1,2,3,4,....28,99 (there are no numbers btwn 28 and 99 on purpose).

what i'm trying to do is cause this field to have a red background when the user is creating a new record to draw user's attention to fact it needs to be entered (it is the second member of a composite PK comprising "Patient Number" and "Cycle"). so, i want the background to display in red until the user's entered a value from the l/u table.

what i've done is decreed the field's default color is red and in the conditional formatting pull down thing used an "Expression is" option for Condition 1 that says "[Cycle] Is Not Null" (w/o the quotation marks).

it's weird, but the field color is never red for this cbx control when the field is open i add record mode although it is red in the design mode. the other thing that's weird is that if, instead of using this "Expression is" option, i replace that with "Field is less than" 0, then no the field does turn red when user goes to add new record and it never stops being red (no matter what value from the cbox is selected). to round things out a bit.....however there is a neighboring control alongside it called "Day Number" which has the said configuration which complies with my design?!?

any clues?

I think what I would do is use the forms On Current property to handle the colors. Besides changing the back color, you might want to change the forecolor so the text can be seen. By default the black text on red background is hard to read. So place this code in the On Current Event of the form:

If IsNull(Combobox) Then
Combobox.BackColor = 255
Combobox.ForeColor = 16777215
Else
Combobox.BackColor = 16777215
Combobox.ForeColor = 0
End If

Then in the AfterUpdate of the combo box use the Me.ReQuery method. Change the syntax to the combo box name you use.

lwells

thanks