Can I BO in MS Access?

[Blackshark]

Hello gents and gent-ess's,

The company I work for has bought BO. Great that it has a VB library but without the deelopers guide and little time to play with it I have a question.

I produce applications that work with the Office suite and our own business apps to reduce paperwork and manual process's.

Can I, by linking the BO library in an Access database, create an instance of BO, run a report, extract some data etc... I have read a few threads and I can see that a lot can be done within BO. I assume though that I can create an instance of BO?

Is there anything important you think I should know? quirks? restrictions?


Thanks for yout time

Tim

 

[blom0344]

Hello Tim,

BO is primarily a front-end tool, not specifically build to work as an add-in to an MS office product. The logical relationship between MS Access and BO is that BO would serve as a front-end to an Access database. As a reporting tool (analysis, multidimensional drilling) it offers features far beyond those of Access.
It is hard for me to imagine what you would want to accomplish, but if you want to use BO reporting power, than without any use of VBA you can use it on a Access database. I create reports with BO that extract data from 3 types of relational sources to give users insight in , for instance, stock levels.
As to your question about creating an instance. BO is NOT a type of database, it works ON databases (or flatfiles, or stored procedures) by creating multidimensional cubes to do reporting and analysis on. It is naturally possible to starts BO reports from an Access application with macro's or VBA if you would want to. T. Blom
Information analyst
tbl@shimano-eu.com

 

[skrandel]

Also, if the company you work for BOUGHT the Developer Kit, you can download very good documentation of the BO Object model. If they didn't buy the SDK, then you can't use the API. Steve Krandel
BASE Consulting Group

http://www.baseconsulting.com

 

[JeffersonH]

Actually BO was DESIGNED for Access, it's very easy to setup and really convenient for you to set up a learning environment almost anywhere.

 

[blom0344]

I have some doubts about BO being DESIGNED for Access, since Access is a jack-of-all-trades with it form and report modules. The fact that BO ships Access databases and universes is probably because that way you can do offline demonstrations. Not everyone has PC versions of the big RDBMS systems installed on their laptop. In many companies Access and BO are somehow natural competitors (as I experience about everyday) T. Blom
Information analyst
tbl@shimano-eu.com

 

[skrandel]

BO was not designed for Access. It just works well with it. It was likely designed for Oracle since the founders started this out as a research project when they were Oracle employees. Steve Krandel
BASE Consulting Group

http://www.baseconsulting.com