Front-End for MS Access migration? [closed]

Answer 1

You won't find an server-class engine that also has the desktop interface design tools attached. The big server engines all expect you to use something like C++, C#, Java, or PHP to build your interface.

I, too, would love to see an upgrade tool for access that would spit out some basic C# forms and talks to an equivalent SQL Server database. It seems that would be a big money-maker for Microsoft because they could use it as a way to up-sell customers to a full SQL Server.

IIRC, there might be a way to tell an Access front end to talk to a SQL Server, or change the tables used by an Access front end to really be linked tables into a SQL Server, or something like that, but I've never had to use the feature myself.

Answer 2

So, other than personnal distaste, why replace the Access front-end? May be easy to do for some (simple) databases, but most Access apps in the real world have a lot of complexity.

Lots of reasons for upgrading the back-end, of course (scalability, performance, db corruption, user-locking). Access even has a built-in "upgrade wizard" tool that allows you to split the forms and logic from the data, and upgrade the data to MS SQL server. If you want, use this wizard to upgrade the back-end to SQL Express, then manually migrate to another db platform.

Hope this is not too far off-topic, but sometimes all you need to do with Access is:

1. Upgrade the back-end (as we've already discussed)

2. Always make sure the front-ends are locked down (read-only)

3. If necessary, create different front-ends for different user roles (as a form of security).

4. If possible, have the front-ends copied locally on each workstation, for performance reasons. You may need to have a network script to check for new versions of the front-end.

I don't have any direct experience with it, but I did find an Access to ASP.Net converter tool called "Access Whiz" at http://www.microtools.us/

Answer 3

@BradC

I don't recomment MicroTools. I worked for a company a while back where we had the same problem. Unless MicroTools has made significant improvements to their product, it spits out garbage last I checked.

What we found was that pretty much any upgrade path will require significant amounts of coding changes. All these tools are good for is to maintain a similar GUI from the original application. Their code had no object structure, just a bunch of utility functions that were dumped on each page to simulate the way Access provides record navigation. If you have a large number of forms, pulling out their solution and implementing your own takes some work and a ton of find-and-replace operations.

We were so disappointed with MicroTools performance that we started writing our own converter. We were pumping out better ASP.NET forms than they were after a week of coding.

Answer 4

We used an internal app based on MS Access as a frontend to a MySQL database. We ran into lots of problems, and eventually rewrote the whole app in CodeGear Delphi 2007 for Win32. This has been a great success, although the migration did cost quite a lot of effort (training/hiring a couple of Delphi programmers, buying some third-party tools). I can wholeheartedly recommend Delphi, though. And AFAIK, integration with a MS Access back-end is certainly possible --- I once wrote a Delphi app that does just that, and it only cost me a couple of days to get a feature-complete version!

I realize this is a full programming solution, so you'd definitely loose some of the ease-of-use of MS Access for building front-ends. Then again, you can put together a database application in Delphi in 10 minutes without writing too much code --- no kidding! And since the 2009 release, the language is slowly becoming more mainstream again...

Answer 5

I switched the back-end on one application from MSacces to MSSQL a few years ago. Kept the front-end, because it worked well, and I didn't find anything as easy to use/modify.

I've never seen a MSAccess -> C# translator. However, you might be able to find a MSAccess to VB6 translator (their syntaxes are roughly similar), and from there there are VB6->VB.Net translators (and even VB.Net ->C# translators)