Data Access Pages (2000)

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I am just starting to look into the use of Data Access Pages in Access and want to try to create a screen for data entry.
I have two tables, Product (containing ProductID and ProductName) and Production (containing ProductID, Date, Quantity) which are linked with the field ProductID.
The Product table contains a list of all products. The Production table will contain details of how many of each product were produced on a specified date.

I want to select the ProductName from a dropdown list, enter the date and quantity and have this information populate the Production table. Only ProductNames contained within the Product table can be accepted. Note – though I am selecting ProductName from the dropdown list it is the associated ProductID which needs to be stored into the Production table.

I have not seen anything about Data Access Pages on the site – wondered if anyone could give me some information about them and point me in the right direction

John

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Few Loungers seem to use Data Access Pages. They are limited – they can only be used in Internet Explorer with ActiveX plugins enabled.

WendellB posted some links you may find useful – see post 426211 and post 366446. The link posted by Francois in post 445515 may shed some light on usung a dropdown list.

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Many thanks Hans – somewhere to start my investigation. It does seem a little limited – fine for just simple record addition and editing, but not so friendly when doing much more.
Would VB be the recommended option as an alternative method of accessing the data directly from Access?

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Why do you want to avoid Access itself? Do you want to create a web application or a standalone application?

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It is my first venture into writing something where we could manage the database with an application designed to be used via Internet Explorer. We want to restrict access to the database in such a way that only people who need to be able to create products/recipies have Access and others who need to view information or enter very little information can do this via Internet Explorer. It may be better to create a separate database with links to the main tables – something we will decide when we see how good/bad/indifferent the data access page idea is

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For a web application, ASP (or ASP.net) together with JavaScript (or VBScript) is much better, as Steve indicated. But I cannot help you with that.

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the easiest way to access and display data from a db to a web page is ASP or ASP.NET (you’ll need or likely wish you had Virtual Studio to implement ASP.NET). Either one of these technologies is MUCH easier to work with, ultimately, than Data Access Pages.

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What is the difference between ASP and ASP.NET? Virtual Studio is something we may well invest in when we have a few pennies available. I presume that in effect this is VB with a few extra links, or is that a bit too much of a simplification?

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The difference between ASP classic and ASP.NET are fairly large. ASP.NET requires loading something called tne .NET Framework to your webserver (the framework is free and has gone to version 2 so far); ASP classic is fully supported in IIS out-of-the box. If you go to ASP.NET you will NEED to have Visual Studio installed for development. ASP classic can be programmed in FrontPage or Notepad, etc. and is really very easy to get started in. So, there’s a buy-in for ASP.NET and server configs to monkey with.

The advantages for one or the other are kind of difficult to quanticize but roughly speaking if you want to have a solution quickly ASP classic is definately the choice. ASP.NET has a lot of advantages once you have started into web application development (for example, form field validation is built in; ASP classic requires JavaScript for validation, and JavaScript is a little difficult to work in at first….) VB uses a ‘block’ coding style that is different from javascript, which is based on C-style coding. The plus side is there’s TONS of tutorials out there for both technologies.

In any cases you’re going to be able to create a web form that is deployable independent of Access per se. Data Access Pages are, IMHO, a bad idea as they aren’t as flexible, have significant browser restraints and tie you to Access as your datasource. Access is NOT recommended for high-volume data manipulation! If you develop a webpage using ASP whatever and find that Access is starting to ‘break up’ under traffic load, you can fairly easily transfer all the coding to hit SQL Server or some other DBMS, so you’re saving yourself a lot of time and trouble.

I highly recommend looking at the following site: http://www.aspfaq.com[/url%5D for advice and coding samples for all things ASP classic. Look for things like creating a DNS-less connection and how to fetch a recordset and display it… If you want to start developing forms for inputting to a db I have an article on a method for doing this here: http://www.devx.com/asp/Article/17745/0%5B/url%5D

Hope this helps! You are embarking on the exciting world of data-driven web pages…

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