[AccessD] MS Access and Python

[Borge Hansen]

Hi all,

After 17 years of mainly just reading about web app development (since
start of .net in 2003) I have just started dabbling with Python, Flask and
SQLalchemy for web app development and web API. Fascinating open source
development environment.

However, question here is if any of you have any experience with using
Python functions - called from MS Access and with a return parameter back
to MS Access?

We have an MS Access app with a email broadcast module that the client is
using about 2 times a year to send out tens of thousands of invitation
emails with personalised attachments. We are using VB software module from
Chilkat software for connecting and transmitting to the smtp server.
However, the task takes quite some time and is of course blocking any
further work on that MS Access frontend while the task is running.

I've been thinking of moving the code for doing this task to a multi
threaded Python function.
I am wondering if it is possible to call such function from within Access
and just getting a "success" or "ran with exceptions" back to Access once
finished. The Python function will talk directly with the SQL backend to
get the data and produce a text file log of all emails sent.

Anyone with ideas / experience on this?

/borge