VBA crashes when trying to insert a multitude of CrossReferences - vba

Question

I encountered a mysterious problem when trying to run the following thing in VBA for Word:
Option Explicit
Sub Test()
Dim allHeadlines As Variant
Dim i As Integer
allHeadlines = ActiveDocument.GetCrossReferenceItems(wdRefTypeHeading) ' Gets all headlines
For i = 1 To UBound(allHeadlines)
Selection.InsertCrossReference ReferenceType:="Nummeriertes Element", _
ReferenceKind:=wdNumberRelativeContext, ReferenceItem:=Str(i), _
InsertAsHyperlink:=True, IncludePosition:=False, SeparateNumbers:=False, _
SeparatorString:=" "
Next
End Sub
The idea was simple: Just get all headlines and write them down automatically. (Actually, my intention was a bit different, but I broke the program down as much as I could.) "Nummeriertes Element" means "numbered element".
After 296 elements, the program crashes with a very unspecific error (Runtime Error '4198': "Command Failed") at the Selection.InsertCrossReference command. If I ignore the error and try to move on, Word crashes with an equally unspecific "heap damaged" error.
What also bothers me is that if I restart the Sub, it will fail immediately with Runtime Error '4198'. I have to restart Word completely to be able to run the Sub again, and then it will again crash at the same point (296 elements). Seems like some buffer is full and will not be cleared until I restart Word, but this is very annoying (I have much more than 300 headlines in this document).
I am quite at a loss here, because I do not really understand what is going on, or how to circumvent the problem. Does somebody else have an idea what is going on or what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

The reason you are getting the error is you don't have a "Nummeriertes Element" reference in your document perhaps OR, more likely, you have 295 "Nummeriertes Element" in your document. When it tries to insert the reference to "Nummeriertes Element"(296), it bombs. The bombing after slamming through a couple pretty fast may just be an issue with Word (I've seen some pretty strange things happen with word and .docm corruptions). Unfortunately, you get that awful error which means absolutely nothing.
Option Explicit
Sub Test()
Dim allHeadlines As Variant
Dim doc As Document
Dim i As Integer
allHeadlines = ActiveDocument.GetCrossReferenceItems(wdRefTypeHeading) ' Gets all headlines
For i = 1 To UBound(allHeadlines)
Selection.InsertCrossReference ReferenceType:=wdRefTypeHeading, _
ReferenceKind:=wdNumberRelativeContext, ReferenceItem:=i, _
InsertAsHyperlink:=True, IncludePosition:=False, SeparateNumbers:=False, _
SeparatorString:=" "
Next i
End Sub
This will cross reference to your headings. When you specify that your ReferenceType is "Nummeriertes Element" on the backend (I assume), it is doing a GetCrossReferenceItems(wdRefTypeNumberedItem) and then you specify you want to get it by the ordinal with wdNumberRelativeContext and trying to grab GetCrossReferenceItems(wdRefTypeNumberedItem)(296) which doesn't exist.
But when you change your ReferenceType to wdRefTypeHeading it will cross reference the heading itself at the ordinal and not your numbered list items. You can the drop then str(i) to just i
Hope it helps.