Misleading error message

I developed a private form several years ago that displays values of private constants. When I open this form, the error message 'Value exceeds permitted quantity' appears; I press on this three times and it disappears whilst the data is being displayed. As this sort-of works and I'm the only person who accesses this form, I hadn't given much thought as to what could be the problem.

The same thing happened at one of my external clients: they want to load an external file then display the contents in a 'load form' for visual checking before converting the data into invoices. The load form displays this 'value exceeds permitted quantity' error message and clicking on it a few times doesn't help. I originally thought that this behaviour was due to some system constant being too low - the example file has 1220 lines. Changing various system constants didn't make any difference.

Last night I decided to solve this problem for once and forever. My first act was to delete the form entirely - maybe something had contaminated it - then redefine it. The data displayed in the form all come from the same table, with no joins, so 'programming' the form was a simple matter. Retrieving all the data caused the same error message; I had to close the form via the task manager. I then retrieved the first record - it displayed correctly. The first ten records display correctly. The first hundred records display correctly. The first seven hundred records display correctly. 

It was only when I retrieved record number 1000 that I found what the problem was and finally understood the misleading error message. The familiar error message appeared, I clicked on it; the error window disappeared and the record appeared. The line number field displayed 1,00 instead of 1000 as I had been expecting - this is the smoking gun. The record number is stored in a field called KLINE that I had defined as an integer of length 4, as I wasn't expecting more than 9999 lines in the file. But the form is displaying this number with a comma separating the thousands, so 1000 was displayed as 1,000 - and this is five characters! Hence the value (i.e. required column width) exceeds the permitted quantity (of characters in the column). All I had to do was lengthen the field from 4 to 6 characters and rebuild the form. Now all the data displays correctly. I suspect that the error message appeared once for every problematic line, meaning that had I pressed on the error message 220 times, the data would have appeared.

The English error message is a faithful translation of the Hebrew message that I was seeing. I don't know which came first, but in both languages the message is extremely misleading and doesn't say what the real problem is. A far better message would be '<column name> is trying to display X characters but is defined of length Y only'.