Publishing Access database reports to the web

Question

Client has a bunch of Access databases and associated reports.

He wants to make the reports available (live, not snapshots) via a secure extranet.

He's willing to recreate the reports using a proprietary GUI if necessary, but ideally would like a solution that exports his reports "as is" to the web.

Had a look at Caspio Bridge. It's pretty slick but doesn't appear to offer grouping and summing (key requirement) without a nasty Javascript hack - seems like a rather glaring omission to me!

Any suggestions?

I'm an ASP.NET developer so if there's coding involved, an ASP.NET based solution would be preferred.

Answer 1

You can try Access Reporter.

http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/AccessReporter/Default.aspx

Answer 2

SQL Server Express edition is free. It includes Reporting Services

http://www.microsoft.com/Sqlserver/2005/en/us/express.aspx

You can connect to the MS Access database (or any other database that you have OLEDB or ODBC connectivity for)

For your existing reports, here is a link on how to migrate just the reports to SQL Server (leave data in MS Access)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966391.aspx

Answer 3

You might like to consider Access 2010, point 3 of the linked document says:

Access your application, data, or forms from virtually anywhere.

Extend your database to the Web so that users without an Access client can open Web forms and reports via a browser and changes are automatically synchronized.1 Or work on your Web database offline, make your design and data changes, and then sync them to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 when you’re reconnected. With Access 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, your data can be protected centrally to meet data compliance, backup, and audit requirements, providing you with increased accessibility and manageability.

-- http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/access/default.aspx

Answer 4

Actually, the suggestion being given here is to move your back and data up to SQL server , but keep your front end application part as is in Access.

So the suggestion isn’t to move your application to SQL server. The suggestion here is to move only the data part of your application to SQL server but continue to use the desktop access application.

So, you link your tables to sql server, and continue to use the access application.

What this means that is you can use SQL server reporting services, or some other web based interface that pulls the data from SQL server. So your access application will be directly updating the data on that SQL server.

This setup works well since you not tying to shuttle data between two separate systems. I know a number of companies that successfully migrated their backend data to SQL server for this very purpose of allowing the Executives and the company Managers to view reports on a web based system.

However, they did not have to throw out or lose the investment and time they spent building the access application part.