Is there a way to use MS Access 2003 with Sourcegear Vault 4.1.4 for source control?

Question

As the title says, I would like to use Vault for source control of an MS Access application that contains forms, queries and modules with vb code. I want to avoid the tedious process of exporting and importing modules to and from text files for the purpose of diffing with previous code.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Access 2003 does work with Visual SourceSafe 6.0.

I have to assume since access does have support for SCC, then perhaps it is a standard interface? I don’t believe SCC for ms-access will work with SourceGear.

You can find info on using VSS 6 with ms-access here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837136/en-us

I used SCC with ms-access. You can even check-in/check out forms or even queries. So, it does allow more then one developer to work on the application at the same time.

Keep in mind the above SCC for ms-access works by using the un-documented

Saveastext

And the reverse is:

LoadFromText

Type the above two commands in the access debug window, it will give you inteli-sense as to what the options + parameters are.

With the above information you certainly could import + export bits and pieces in and out of ms-access into Source Gear.

So it is a bit of a long shot to get SCC feature of ms-access working with Soruce Gear, but you could cobble together something that pulls objects in and out of Source Gear by using the above two commands.

Answer 2

The only thing I can add to Albert Kallal's answer is that I actually did use MS Access with two different source control providers - with MS Visual SourceSafe and with SourceGear's SourceOffSite.

There were some occassional problems when our team was using SourceOffSite - like sudden failures of MS Access during some source control operations - but all in all it worked. (Perhaps those problems were caused by the fact that we sometimes "mixed" those two source control providers - i.e. one developer was using VSS and another was using SOS. So I can't really blame those problems on MS Access itself.)

Now, I never used Vault. But, since SourceOffsite and Vault come from the same vendor, I think there is a very good chance that (a) SourceGear offers an MSSCCI provider for Vault and (b) MS Access can be used with Vault successfully.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I haven't tried earlier versions, but I can confirm that SourceGear Vault 5.0.4 can be used with Microsoft Access 2003 (with the Access 2003 Add-in: Source Code Control installed).

For this to work, you need to enable a option in Vault Client called "Make Vault your default SCC provider".