Gustav Brock
gustav at cactus.dk
Fri Mar 19 12:54:42 CST 2004
Hi Christopher What you are requesting is some sort of "Access report server engine". I see three options when a report is requested: 1. Make a direct call to Access to open and print the report. 2. Raise an event which is caught by a running Access instance. 3. Create a message queue. Put the name etc. of the report into the queue, have Access to poll the queue and print when an entry is found. For 1. and 2. you will have the problem that Access is single threaded which means that if Access is printing a report it cannot initiate printing another. For 1. you could possibly - as long system resources permit - open a new instance of Access. This could be hard to control. For 2. I don't know if it is possible to have several instances of Access running to watch for the same event. For 3. you should be able to have several instances running polling at random intervals to obtain a needed total output capacity (reports per hour). I too would be very interested if some of you have some experiences with a setup for a purpose like this as Access is an excellent report engine and - run as runtimes - at zero cost compared to the quite expensive Crystal Reports. /gustav > If I'm reading this right, it doesn't support reportign on demand - > I'd have to save a copy of each report in .snp format in order for > the users to view them in the SnapShot viewer. Am I missing > something? > -C- > ---- Original Message ---- > From: Mark.Mitsules at ngc.com > To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com, > Subject: RE: [AccessD] Using Access for Reports w/an ASP app? > Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 13:09:18 -0500 >>Cheap...sure...Snapshot Viewer. >> >>http://www.microsoft.com/accessdev/articles/snapshot.htm?gssnb=1 >> >>See >>http://www.microsoft.com/accessdev/articles/snapshot.htm?gssnb=1#WWW >> >>Mark >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Christopher Hawkins [mailto:clh at christopherhawkins.com] >>Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 12:03 PM >>To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com >>Subject: [AccessD] Using Access for Reports w/an ASP app? >> >> >>Greetings! >> >>Here's my deal - I have a spectacularly cheap client who brought me >>on to fix an Access application that was botched by another >>programmer (90% of my business falls into this category. :P), but >>they've decided that Access is at least partly to blame for the >>failure of the project (again, I say :P). >> >>So they want me to re-write the front-end in ASP. No problem there - >>most of the problems are in the UI; the schema is surprisingly good, >>considering the UI (it's truly poor). >> >>The roadblock I'm encountering is this: how do I make sure they can >>still access their reports? They have some pretty complex reports in >>that Access app, and they won't pay for Crystal. >> >>I was thinking that I'd leave a copy of their Access mdb on the web >>server and then write a dll that would open a report, write it ti >>pdf, and then return it to the browser. The only problem is...I have >>no idea how to do that. I also don't know if it's a smart thing to >>do. I also don't knwo if they'll want to pay for the dev time. >> >>Barring the above idea, is anyone aware of a cheap or free web >>reporting utility/tool/component that I can use to either leverage >>their existing reports, or re-create them for web use without having >>to go with something expensive like Crystal?