How can i access and manipulate a mdb file available online (on web) using VB

Question

I have a mdb file hosted on my site http://www.simplyfy.co.in/db/dbfile.mdb. I am developing an application which will be running on multiple machines and will contact the mdb file via internet. I am not sure how do i go about it as building the connection string for an online connection. Any help?

Answer 1

I think it is possible to access the same way that access a local file, simply using the URL as Data Source. That is, the connection string looks like:

Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;User ID=...;Data Source=http://www.simplyfy.co.in/db/dbfile.mdb;Mode=..., etc

HTH

Answer 2

You do not - not at all, not even a little bit, want to expose a .MDB file directly over the internet. You really, really do not want to do this.

There are two reasons and I'll start with second, even if it works - and since it needs to be able to create a .ldb file if its not read only I'm not sure it will - it is liable to be horribly slow. Multi-user MDB can be bad enough over a local network.

The other reason is security, assuming it works at all you're going to really struggle to make this even vaguely safe.

Broadly speaking what you need to do is to create a web service that runs on your site that provides an secured API that your client applications can use to access your database - this gives you two benefits: 1) its much more secure (you're not exposing webspace with write permissions) and 2) it gives you the ability to change the back end data store if required without affecting the clients. There are various possibilities for implementing this but it will depend on the tools you have/are comfortable with.