I want to have a database placed on web hotel which supports Access database and SQL. So I purchased Office XP developer since I thaught I neaded full tools and FrontPage do do my work easy fast. This is what I so far has concluded:
1) Designing a database in Access is easy for anybody. To create a html page from your Access database from Access is more or less no problem when you have studied the various examples on the web.
2) However - reading carefully the documentation, you will find that only clients with Office XP installed can actualy get access by the html page to your database on the external web server. So my idea og having my database placed on an external webserver, and have access to my database through a browser from anywhere and any PC in the world couldnt get realised. I will someday be in an business launce with web acces, or in a public liberary, or at a friens place and actualy not be able to access my database if the PC hasnt got Office XP installed. So in a nutchell if you ever expect to access your data from a non-Office XP machine then forget to use the web publish feature in Access ( even though is a very powerfull tool to generate XML web pages form your Access database).
3) Then we are back in using ASP as the way to access your database from a browser. ASP can be red from almost any browser and any machine. And - then you start up FrontPage which you think will do the job for you. However - FrontPage is quite complex, and to manage your web page using FrontPage is a hard task. It insists to update your entier web pages, when only updating a single or a few web pages is needed. And usualy something is not configurated right so it will hang or simply refuse to do the job. I found that using my good old WS-FTP program was more easy and secure. You get what you see and have full controle of which files you transfer. So actualy using FrontPage to make the ASP job for you is not recommendable.
4)
So end of line - browsing the web for Access database ASP examples, and cut the code you need and paste to your .asp textfile is what you find is the most effective, and you maintain full controle of what is happening.
Conclusion:
- Office XP is exactly what the product name tells - only for use on Office XP machines.
- Access is a briliant tool to create your database-tables, and thats it if you are going to use a browser to access your database.
- You will always face the moment where you need to access your database from a PC which dosnt have an Office XP installed - so you nedd to use ASP and not XML.
- It is far more effective to create your ASP documetns by copy and paste, or perhaps a dedicated ASP GUI design tool, than to use frontPage.
- You wonder whay Office XML has ever been invented, since the idea is to access your database from a browser, but you will find that half the world can not read it.
