How to check when a VBA module was modified?

Question

I have written a version control module. The AutoExec macro launches it whenever I, or one of the other maintainers log in. It looks for database objects that have been created or modified since the previous update, and then adds an entry to the Versions table and then opens the table (filtered to the last record) so I can type in a summary of the changes I performed.

It is working great for Tables, Queries, Forms, Macros, etc but I cannot get it to work correctly for modules.

I have found two different properties that suggest a Last Modified date ...

CurrentDB.Containers("Modules").Documents("MyModule").Properties("LastUpdated").Value
CurrentProject.AllModules("MyModule").DateModified

The first one (CurrentDB) always shows "LastUpdated" as the Date it was created, unless you modify the description of the module or something in the interface. This tells me that this property is purely for the container object - not what's in it.

The second one works a lot better. It accurately shows the date when I modify and compile/save the module. The only problem is that when you save or compile a module, it saves / compiles ALL the modules again, and therefore sets the DateModified field to the same date across the board. It kind of defeats the purpose of having the DateModified property on the individual modules doesn't it?

So my next course of action is going to a bit more drastic. I am thinking I will need to maintain a list of all the modules, and count the lines of code in each module using VBA Extensions. Then, if the lines of code differs from what the list has recorded - then I know that the module has been modified - I just won't know when, other than "since the last time I checked"

Does anyone have a better approach? I'd rather not do my next course of action because I can see it noticeably affecting database performance (in the bad kind of way)

Answer 1

I thought I would add the final code I came up with for a hash / checksum generation module, since that was really the piece I was missing. Credit to the @BlackHawk answer for filling in the gap by showing that you can late bind .NET classes - that's going to open up a lot of possibilities for me now.

I have finished writing my Version checker. There were a few caveats that I encountered that made it hard to rely on the LastUpdated date.

1. Resizing the columns in a Table or Query changed the LastUpdated date.
2. Compiling any Module compiled all modules, thus updated all module's LastUpdated date (as was already pointed out)
3. Adding a filter to a form in View mode causes the form's Filter field to be updated,which in turn updates the LastUpdated date.
4. When using SaveAsText on a Form or Report, changing a printer or display driver can affect the PrtDevMode encodings, so it is necessary to strip them out before calculating a checksum

For Tables I built a string that was a concatenation of the table name, all field names with their size and data types. I then computed the hash on those.

For Queries I simply computed the hash on the SQL.

For Modules, Macros, Forms, and Reports I used the Application.SaveAsText to save it to a temporary file. I then read that file in to a string and computed a hash on it. For Forms and Reports I didn't start adding to the string until the "Begin" line passed.

Seems to be working now and I haven't come across any situations where it would prompt for a version revision when something wasn't actually changed.

For calculating a checksum or hash, I built a Class Module named CryptoHash. Here is the full source below. I optimized the Bytes Array to Hex String conversion to be quicker.

Option Compare Database
Option Explicit

Private objProvider As Object          ' Late Bound object variable for MD5 Provider
Private objEncoder As Object           ' Late Bound object variable for Text Encoder
Private strArrHex(255) As String       ' Hexadecimal lookup table array

Public Enum hashServiceProviders
  MD5
  SHA1
  SHA256
  SHA384
  SHA512
End Enum

Private Sub Class_Initialize()
  Const C_HEX = "0123456789ABCDEF"
  Dim intIdx As Integer               ' Our Array Index Iteration variable

  ' Instantiate our two .NET class objects
  Set objEncoder = CreateObject("System.Text.UTF8Encoding")
  Set objProvider = CreateObject("System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider")

  ' Initialize our Lookup Table (array)
  For intIdx = 0 To 255
    ' A byte is represented within two hexadecimal digits.
    ' When divided by 16, the whole number is the first hex character
    '                     the remainder is the second hex character
    ' Populate our Lookup table (array)
    strArrHex(intIdx) = Mid(C_HEX, (intIdx \ 16) + 1, 1) & Mid(C_HEX, (intIdx Mod 16) + 1, 1)
  Next

End Sub

Private Sub Class_Terminate()
  ' Explicity remove the references to our objects so Access can free memory
  Set objProvider = Nothing
  Set objEncoder = Nothing
End Sub

Public Property Let Provider(NewProvider As hashServiceProviders)

  ' Switch our Cryptographic hash provider
  Select Case NewProvider
    Case MD5:
      Set objProvider = CreateObject("System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider")
    Case SHA1:
      Set objProvider = CreateObject("System.Security.Cryptography.SHA1CryptoServiceProvider")
    Case SHA256:
      Set objProvider = CreateObject("System.Security.Cryptography.SHA256Managed")
    Case SHA384:
      Set objProvider = CreateObject("System.Security.Cryptography.SHA384Managed")
    Case SHA512:
      Set objProvider = CreateObject("System.Security.Cryptography.SHA512Managed")
    Case Else:
      Err.Raise vbObjectError + 2029, "CryptoHash::Provider", "Invalid Provider Specified"
  End Select

End Property

' Converts an array of bytes into a hexadecimal string
Private Function Hash_BytesToHex(bytArr() As Byte) As String
  Dim lngArrayUBound As Long         ' The Upper Bound limit of our byte array
  Dim intIdx As Long                 ' Our Array Index Iteration variable

  ' Not sure if VBA re-evaluates the loop terminator with every iteration or not
  ' When speed matters, I usually put it in its own variable just to be safe
  lngArrayUBound = UBound(bytArr)

  ' For each element in our byte array, add a character to the return value
  For intIdx = 0 To lngArrayUBound
    Hash_BytesToHex = Hash_BytesToHex & strArrHex(bytArr(intIdx))
  Next
End Function

' Computes a Hash on the supplied string
Public Function Compute(SourceString As String) As String
  Dim BytArrData() As Byte           ' Byte Array produced from our SourceString
  Dim BytArrHash() As Byte           ' Byte Array returned from our MD5 Provider

  ' Note:
  ' Because some languages (including VBA) do not support method overloading,
  ' the COM system uses "name mangling" in order to allow the proper method
  ' to be called.  This name mangling appends a number at the end of the function.
  ' You can check the MSDN documentation to see how many overloaded variations exist

  ' Convert our Source String into an array of bytes.
  BytArrData = objEncoder.GetBytes_4(SourceString)

  ' Compute the MD5 hash and store in an array of bytes
  BytArrHash = objProvider.ComputeHash_2(BytArrData)

  ' Convert our Bytes into a hexadecimal representation
  Compute = Hash_BytesToHex(BytArrHash)

  ' Free up our dynamic array memory
  Erase BytArrData
  Erase BytArrHash

End Function

Answer 2

Here's a simpler suggestion:

1. Calculate the MD5 hash for each module.
2. Store it in the Versions table.
3. Recalculate it for each module during the AutoExec and compare it to the one in the Versions table. If it's different, you can assume it has been changed (while MD5 is bad for security, it's still solid for integrity).

To get the text from a module using VBE Extensibility, you can do

Dim oMod As CodeModule
Dim strMod As String
Set oMod = VBE.ActiveVBProject.VBComponents(1).CodeModule
strMod = oMod.Lines(1, oMod.CountOfLines)

And then you can use the following modified MD5 hash function from this answer as below, you can take the hash of each module to store it, then compare it in your AutoExec.

Public Function StringToMD5Hex(s As String) As String
    Dim enc
    Dim bytes() As Byte
    Dim outstr As String
    Dim pos As Integer
    Set enc = CreateObject("System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider")
    'Convert the string to a byte array and hash it
    bytes = StrConv(s, vbFromUnicode)
    bytes = enc.ComputeHash_2((bytes))
    'Convert the byte array to a hex string
    For pos = 0 To UBound(bytes)
        outstr = outstr & LCase(Right("0" & Hex(bytes(pos)), 2))
    Next
    StringToMD5Hex = outstr
    Set enc = Nothing
End Function

Answer 3

You can't know when a module was modified. The VBIDE API doesn't even tell you whether a module was modified, so you have to figure that out yourself.

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The VBIDE API makes it excruciatingly painful - as you've noticed.

Rubberduck doesn't deal with host-specific components yet (e.g. tables, queries, etc.), but its parser does a pretty good job at telling whether a module was modified since the last parse.

"Modified since last time I checked" is really all you need to know. You can't rely on line counts though, because this:

Option Explicit

Sub DoSomething
    'todo: implement
End Sub

Would be the same as this:

Option Explicit

Sub DoSomething
    DoSomethingElse 42
End Sub

And obviously you'd want that change to be picked up and tracked. Comparing every character on every single line of code would work, but there's a much faster way.

The general idea is to grab a CodeModule's contents, hash it, and then compare against the previous content hash - if anything was modified, we're looking at a "dirty" module. It's C#, and I don't know if there's a COM library that can readily hash a string from VBA, but worst-case you could compile a little utility DLL in .NET that exposes a COM-visible function that takes a String and returns a hash for it, shouldn't be too complicated.

Here's the relevant code from Rubberduck.VBEditor.SafeComWrappers.VBA.CodeModule, if it's any help:

private string _previousContentHash;
public string ContentHash()
{
    using (var hash = new SHA256Managed())
    using (var stream = Content().ToStream())
    {
        return _previousContentHash = new string(Encoding.Unicode.GetChars(hash.ComputeHash(stream)));
    }
}

public string Content()
{
    return Target.CountOfLines == 0 ? string.Empty : GetLines(1, CountOfLines);
}

public string GetLines(Selection selection)
{
    return GetLines(selection.StartLine, selection.LineCount);
}

public string GetLines(int startLine, int count)
{
    return Target.get_Lines(startLine, count);
}

Here Target is a Microsoft.Vbe.Interop.CodeModule object - if you're in VBA land then that's simply a CodeModule, from the VBA Extensibility library; something like this:

Public Function IsModified(ByVal target As CodeModule, ByVal previousHash As String) As Boolean

    Dim content As String
    If target.CountOfLines = 0 Then
        content = vbNullString
    Else
        content = target.GetLines(1, target.CountOfLines)
    End If

    Dim hash As String
    hash = MyHashingLibrary.MyHashingFunction(content)

    IsModified = (hash <> previousHash)

End Function

So yeah, your "drastic" solution is pretty much the only reliable way to go about it. Few things to keep in mind:

• "Keeping a list of all modules" will work, but if you only store module names, and a module was renamed, your cache is stale and you need a way to invalidate it.
• If you store the ObjPtr of each module object rather than their names, I'm not sure if it's reliable in VBA, but I can tell you that through COM interop, a COM object's hashcode isn't going to be consistently consistent between calls - so you'll have a stale cache and a way to invalidate it, that way too. Possibly not an issue with a 100% VBA solution though.

I'd go with a Dictionary that stores the modules' object pointer as a key, and their content hash as a value.

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That said as the administrator of the Rubberduck project, I'd much rather see you join us and help us integrate full-featured source control (i.e. with host-specific features) directly into the VBE =)