[AccessD] Screen Scraping - GUI-less Mode on Windows Server 2012

[Brad Marks]

All,

I have an application that pulls data from a purchased manufacturing system and then feeds this data into a purchased accounting system.

The only way to feed data into the purchased accounting system is via the screens/forms provided by the package.

The application that I built uses Access 2007 to pull the data from the manufacturing system and a scripting tool called AutoHotKey to do “Screen Scraping” to feed the data into the accounting system via the accounting system’s screens.

This method works, but it is not ideal.

I used AutoHotKey to do the screen scraping because I knew how to use this tool to do this and because I was not sure if Access could be used to easily read and write screens from another application.

Is it possible to do this with Access?



My second question is a bit more complicated.  

This application has been running successfully every night for about 6 months.  It runs in unattended mode.  It runs on a server (Windows 2012).

Currently, in order for this application to run, I need to be connected from a desktop PC via Remote Desktop to the server.  If this connection is lost, the application will not run. 

As I understand it, the server goes into “GUI-less” mode when the remote desktop connection is lost.  Therefore, I currently keep a remote desktop connection from my desktop PC to the Server all of the time.

This works, but I do not like the need to have the remote desktop connection available all of the time.

If the desktop PC goes down or is rebooted, the remote desktop connection is lost and needs to be re-established.

I am not very familiar with the idea of the “GUI-less” mode on the server.  I wonder if there is a way to prevent the server from going into GUI-less mode when the remote desktop connection is lost.

Has anyone else ever run into anything like this?

Any suggestions on how to improve this situation?

Thanks,

Brad