How to set up a development environment in MS Access

Question

I have created an MS Access 2003 application, set up as a split front-end/back-end configuration, with a user group of about five people. The front end .mdb sits on a network fi

Answer 1

Use VBA to unlink and re-link your tables to the new target when switching from dev to prod. It's been to many years for me to remember the syntax--I just know the function was simple to write.

Or use MS-Access to talk to MS-Access through ODBC, or some other data connection that lives outside of the client mdb.

As with all file base databases, you will eventually run into problems with peak usage or when you go over a small magical number somewhere between 2 and 30.

Also, Access tends to corrupt frequently, so backup, compact and repair need to be done on an frequent basis. 3rd party tools used to exist to automate this task.

As far as performance goes, the data is being processed client side, so you might want to use something like netmeter to watch how much data is going over the wire. The same principle about indexing and avoiding table scans apply to file base dbs as well.

Answer 2

1) Relink Access tables from code http://www.mvps.org/access/tables/tbl0009.htm

Once I'm ready to publish a new MDE to the users I relink the tables, make the MDE and copy the MDE to the server.

2) I specifically created the free Auto FE Updater utility so that I could make changes to the FE MDE as often as I wanted and be quite confident that the next time someone went to run the app that it would pull in the latest version. For more info on the errors or the Auto FE Updater utility see the free Auto FE Updater utility at http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/autofe.htm at my website to keep the FE on each PC up to date.

3) Now when working on site at a clients I make the updates to the table structure after hours when everyone is out of the system. See HOW TO: Detect User Idle Time or Inactivity in Access 2000 (Q210297) http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=210297 ACC: How to Detect User Idle Time or Inactivity (Q128814) http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=128814

However we found that the code which runs on the timer event must be disabled for the programmers. Otherwise weird things start happening when you're editing code.

Also print preview would sometimes not allow the users to run a menu item to export the report to Excel or others. So you had to right click on the Previewed report to get some type of internal focus back on the report so they could then export it. This was also helped by extending the timer to five minutes.

The downside to extending the timer to five minutes was if a person stays in the same form and at the same control for considerable parts of the day, ie someone doing the same inquiries, the routine didn't realize that they had actually done something. I'll be putting in some logic sometime to reset this timer whenever they do something in the program.

4) In reference to another person commenting about scripts and such to update the schema see Compare'Em http://home.gci.net/~mike-noel/CompareEM-LITE/CompareEM.htm. While it has its quirks it does create the VBA code to update tables, fields, indexes and relationships.