Persuade Access 2007 to use a .UDL file/oledb connection?

Question

Is there any way of coaxing Access 2007 into using a .UDL file?

Specifically, one of our older products uses an Interbase 6.0 database. My client would like to link to his database, for read/write, using Access 2007 (in the short term).

While this isn't my preferred way of doing things at all, given it's all single-user and the other access to the Interbase database is all done via a Delphi 7 client, I can't really just say 'no' - at least, not until I have the time to 'properly' give him what he wants.

I don't have any other kind of driver that Access could use, although I have made a .UDL file that successfully links (via IBoledb) to the database. Stupidly, I just assumed that a modern version of Access would be able to use a .UDL file...

So, I tried to get Access 2007 to make sense of that .UDL file (even tried renaming it to .DSN and messing around with some of the values in the file) but to no avail. It seems that the only way you can get Access to link to Interbase would be via a (purchased, third-party) Interbase ODBC driver.

Anyone know different? Can I somehow get Access to 'link tables' with Interbase via a .UDL link?

Cheers!

Answer 1

It doesn't seem to be possible. Although Access will happily talk to SQL Server using OLEDB, there doesn't seem to be a way to get it to use OLEDB connections to other databases.

At least now that I can 'accept my own answers' I can 'close' this question. :-)