Tom,
Every man and his dog seems to have an Access database they want to view
on the web.
What I usually do for them is :
a) Tell them to save the data from Access as a text file, comma separated. (It's
a standard Access option).
b) Give them a web page where they can upload it, (<INPUT TYPE=FILE etc., it's
discussed in the php manual).
c) Parse the file using parsecsv and store away the bits you want in MySQL. If you
get them to leave the field names on the first line of the file (another standard
Access option), you can do a quick check that all the fields are there and in
the expected place, before you put the data into MySQL.
d) Serve the web pages from MySQL.
e) You may still need your Web Data Administration. There's often missing data
that you need for sensible web pages e.g. categories, more user friendly descriptions
of codes etc.
>From the customer's point of view the uploads are a manual exercise which doesn't
>sound
very sexy, and it would probably take them 3-4 minutes every time.
The good thing is that it's all pretty easy, and they should be able to get their
most junior member of staff to do it. They also get the comfort of knowing if anything
went wrong.
If that's not acceptable, it's more tricky. In principle you could use an
ODBC interface to their Access database to establish a live connection to it
and suck up the data that way, but it's fiddly and much less reliable than
a boring old upload.
Another option would be to execute the extract and transfer of the data via a batch
job running on their platform. But, personally, I would hate to have to support
that kind of activity.
The bottom line as far as I'm concerned is that if they insist on holding important
information on a MS platform, they can expect a) not to have a seamless operation,
b) to have to watch out for problems themselves! Once they see how easy an
extract/upload
is they probably won't mind anyway.
Tom Beidler wrote:
>
> I have a potential customer that just called and would like to create a web
> site that would display secure info for their clients. Currently his
> employees are using a flat Access database to add, edit and delete records
> and he would like to keep it that way.
>
> Normally I would create a web manager for them to add, edit and delete the
> MySQL database. Is there an easy, reliable way to sync up Access with MySQL.
> Maybe a nightly script that could upload the contents of Access to MySQL.
>
> Would it be easier to start with ASP and SQL Server?
>
> Thanks,
> Tom
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