Doug Murphy
dw-murphy at cox.net
Fri Sep 10 14:22:34 CDT 2010
John, Could you create a VS project that connects to the Access tables to use the web interaction capabilities of Visual Studio to step through your records? I have used wininet to interact from vba to asp web pages, but that used the query string to pass data and then I took the page returned and parsed out the return data. Do you know how the current page passes it's data to the server? It may be possible to just interact from a Visual Studio winforms app. Or Access vba if you know how to send the data and recieve the replies. Doug -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 5:34 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] LightSwitch (was: Automating web page entry (was: Scroll button)) Gustav, That does sound amazing, and I will check it out. I am all about C# / Visual Studio. However understand that this is an existing (very old) fairly large application, written ages ago in Access (by a developer long gone), that I simply maintain for my client. This specific piece is taking data from this system, pulling the billing information into a form and trying to allow them to get the data out of Access and into the Web page in an expeditious fashion. Not a trivial task (at least in Access) given the web form I have to work with. I might be able to convince them to move just this one piece out to an external application. This is a huge time suck for them and the rest of the state of PA. To be honest I am praying that they will wise up and start accepting data files. Anyway, thanks for continuing to mention LightSwitch. I will definitely check it out. Are you using it for anything specific yet? John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com On 9/10/2010 8:15 AM, Gustav Brock wrote: > Hi John (et al) > > It's about time you spend some hours with the beta of LightSwitch, the new rapid development "shell" to Visual Studio 2010: > > http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch > > and watch the tutorial videos. It is an amazing piece of software - kind of what Access could have been, had the Access team primarily had the developer in mind. > > The way controls of screens (= forms) are organized is so clever that you wonder why no one has figured this out before. Note too how you can change "skin" from a normal desktop app to a highly optimized touch-screen app, and how - by flipping a switch - you change the resulting app from a desktop app to a web app. And everything behind the scene you can customize and expand in C# or VB.NET. > > /gustav > > >>>> jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com 10-09-2010 13:32>>> > Yes, but I need the program to do stuff in access. While I can > appreciate using scripting languages, there is something to be said for using the language built in to Access. > > The user enters sets of data records, basically all services supplied > to a specific child by a specific therapist during a week. After > entering the last record for that child, the user clicks a button on > the web page and the web page returns a "status" for all of the > records entered, which I then have the user capture and insert back into a control on the form and more code runs in the form to parse that information and writes back into all of the records entered for that child. > > It is a sucky system (yes, stupidity irritates me, particularly when I have to program around it). > > For the purposes of the discussion here though, we have a perfectly > good language called VBA to use to write our applications. To do this > little piece in VBA, then call out to AutoIt to do this little piece, then run more VBA then call autoit, then run VBA... > > C'mon. > > VBA can automate IE, I know that because I have done that. How about > we discuss VBA automation of IE and how a single solution in the language behind Access might solve the problem? > > John W. Colby > www.ColbyConsulting.com > > On 9/10/2010 7:00 AM, Stuart McLachlan wrote: >> I did exactly the same with an application by a paint manufacturer >> for mixing paints a few years ago using AutoIt. Same result. > > -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com