Christopher Hawkins
clh at christopherhawkins.com
Fri Mar 19 11:02:58 CST 2004
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? -Christopher-