Stuart McLachlan
stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Fri Feb 14 01:05:47 CST 2014
Writing the app to send the data from an Android mobile device is quite simple with Basic4Android. :-) You can do it in at least four ways that I can think of: 1. SMS 2. Email 3. HTTP Post message 4. FTP. There are B4A libraries to use all of these methods quite simply, so the hard part is getting the data into the database at the receiving end. Solutions would be: 1. SMS: Either an SMS to EMail gateway , in which case t is the same subsequent solution as 2, or a GPRS device and SIM card to receive the SMS on the PC - that will require 3rd party software and an interface between that software and your database. IOW, not simple. 2. Email. Device sends an email to a dedicated address. An app on the database server polls the mailbox, downloads any emails, strips out the content and puts it into the database (that's exactly how we handle the PNG National Election results - using an application I wrote in PowerBASIC to do the polling/data transfer) 3. HTTP Post message - device sends a HTTP message to a web server's simple PHP page which accepts the post data and drops it into a database. Code to send the message is very simple to write. If you have a webserver available with PHP, the webpage is also very simple to write. 4. FTP. Fairly simple to write something to transfer the data to an FTP server. You then use a similar approach to 2 above to poll the FTP server for new files and download and parse the data from the server . Option 3 is definitely the simplest to implement if you have the web server. You can put WAMP on a machine inside your network listening on a high port number and forward that port on your router for a fairly solid, secure solution to getting the data in real time ( i.e. no need for periodic polling) On 14 Feb 2014 at 4:55, Paul Hartland wrote: > To all, > > I am working on a little project, which if works has potential to > become quite big. This however involves a learning curve for me in > developing applications for mobile phones but I am sure I can get to > grips with this. > The way I see this working is that the user will enter a code and > message > on the phone application (or even just send it as an SMS which saves > me the mobile application piece) and press send and this message will > be stored in a MS Access or SQL Database, the part I can't see is how > the message will get from the phone application into the database, I > can't seem to see a way of avoiding a third party software. I > envisaged the application to send the message as an SMS and appear in > an email, where my server side application would scan for new emails, > then if found would write some of the contents to the database. > > Is this possible to achieve without a third party software solution, > bearing in mind that the phones sending the SMS could have a variety > of providers as in O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile etc etc. > > Thanks in advance for any help on this. > > -- > Paul Hartland > paul.hartland at googlemail.com > _______________________________________________ > dba-Tech mailing list > dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com >