[AccessD] External dependencies

[Ryan W]

Stuart,
  So yeah, I am using docmd.outputto to get reports from our access FE,
then in the second half of the loop it's grabbing the certificates from the
vendor regarding that same ID used to generate the first report.

  I/we were just assembling them after the fact with our PDF Editor (Nitro
PDF Pro) (before I realized we had this old library that might be better to
use) but I found that process a bit clunky given that in the end, my end
users will be doing this.  There are other perks to using the library, such
as being able to specify bookmark names, child bookmarks (the log, then the
certificate(s) as child(ren)), ignoring PDFs that have limitations on what
you can do with the PDF (we just want to assemble them with our log file,
nothing nefarious) and paginate the whole thing and add a title/cover page.

 During the semi-automated assembly process using NitroPDF, it would kick
out password protected PDFs and was slower overall at merging documents (in
this case, 170 documents, close to 300 pages).

The merged NitroPDF file was close to 35 MB, with PDFlib (the library I'm
using) it's under 15MB. Can probably still be emailed and overall requires
less hand-holding, less clicks to generate the document, etc.  The downside
is the cost to upgrade from the version I'm on (which doesn't ignore
password protected PDFs, doesn't pull in annotations and a few other
things) is about $1000 per seat.  It's gone up substantially since we
purchased our seats in 2007/2008.

VPE looks to do a lot of this, but the cost for the features I want is
inline with what PDFlib wants and I've already written out most of my
PDFlib code into python. I'm just working out on ensuring it works reliably
now.





On Mon, Jun 5, 2023 at 6:10 PM Stuart McLachlan <stuart at lexacorp.com.pg>
wrote:

> What did you commercial product do that an Access report with
> DoCmd.OutputTo acReport, "rptSoeReport", acFormatPDF, ReportFolder() &
> "SOmeReport" & ".pdf", False
> won't do?
>
> If that doesn't work, have you tried VPE, it's very powerful and fairly
> easy to use and just
> requires distribution of one DLL with your application.
>
> https://www.idealsoftware.com/en/pdf-library/report-engine.html
>
> "The VPE Community Edition is free of charge and - also for commercial
> applications - royalty-free. For this edition IDEAL Software does not
> provide any
> warranties nor support liabilities at all. In addition updates are not
> provided on a
> regular basis and not neccessarily at the same time as the commercial
> editions.
>
> The free-of-charge provision is based on the principle of fairness:
> If you are using VPE in a commercial application which generates profit,
> we would
> like to ask you to acquire licenses for the full version."
>
> I use the .standard DLL, but
>
>
>
> On 5 Jun 2023 at 16:30, Ryan W wrote:
>
> > I have some code that does some PDF assembly and manipulation via a
> > commercial product that up until the most recent version has COM
> > binding so I could do it all natively in Access.
> >
> > The latest version dropped the COM library but has some features I
> > want/need.
> >
> > I re-wrote the code in python using their trial libary and used a
> > utility to bundle that as an exe so I don't have to concern myself
> > with making sure all the users have python installed but instead can
> > just launch the executable (from code) with a couple command line
> > switches to pass in data needed for output.
> >
> > I'm really not a fan of having external dependencies if I can avoid
> > them. More stuff to bundle/remember/set up when deploying new
> > workstations and such.... but I guess "it is what it is".
> >
> > Anyone have any pointers, gotchas or words of wisdom for scenarios
> > like this? -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com
> > https://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website:
> > http://www.databaseadvisors.com
> >
>
>
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