good afternoon! I apologize in a

[kathryn]

good afternoon!

I apologize in advance if this has been asked innumerable times, but the Search function is down right now and I am tearing my hair out.

I have an administration site for my intranet which allows certain users to add records to various SQL database tables using CF forms. For example, there is an admin piece for Job Postings, Employee Info, Phone Numbers, etc. The data is viewed by the general employee population through the main intranet site.

My problem is that we are not totally networked yet and my administrators still need to print out paper reports. Currently, I have them all set up with MS Access Databases which have linked tables from the SQL database which generate the reports.

My brilliant idea this morning was to use a command button on the admin page to locate to a page with a CFEXECUTE tag which would open MS Access and run the reports, transparently to the user. However, apparently CFEXECUTE can only work on the server on which CF server resides. So the first thing I would have to do is install MS Access on two servers, our development and our production servers. Next, running Access reports on those server raises the issue of how to get the print-out to the various local printers.

This is getting very complicated. I am interested in what others in my situation have done. Many companies must be in a similar situation; transitioning between paper-based and browser-based.

Thanks for any input, suggestions, and/or war stories you may have.


Kathryn

 

[GunJack]

Since you're working in an Intranet scenario, I have an idea that might work. You could create a link to an Access database on the server which contains the reports. You could then create a macro that prints the reports then exits and set this to run as soon as the database is opened. By linking to this database directly, you should be able to configure the browsers to spawn Access for ".mdb" files. When they click the link, it should download the database, spawn Acces, start the macro, and then exit.

It's not an ideal scenario but I don't know of any easy way to generate reports through Access without installing Access on the server and using something like DDE. Another option which would be more reliable and complicated at the same time would be to write a VB application that reads the database and prints to a printer. You could compile this as an OCX and call it via CF's <cfobject> tag. You could even supply printer names to the OCX and have it print to the user's default printer. It's probably more work than it's worth but an alternative at least.

Hope this helps,
GJ

 

[iqof188]

GunJack is right. Through COM you can have a macro create the reports for you, and then have the macro print out the report to the user's default printer. Following links will help you get started:

http://www.cfcomet.com/cfcomet/access/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/officedev/off2000/acsumAccessObjHierarchy.htm

Post again if you get stuck! Good luck.


<webguru>iqof188</webguru>