Is there a way to consume a web service in Access 97 VBA?

Question

The question is simple enough. And judging by my last thirty minutes of searching around, I'm assuming that the answer is a resounding "no".

So if it's a no, here's a follow up question: What's the best workaround? Is a COM wrapper around the web service a viable solution for a VBA version that old?

Most of the functionality in the web service is simple data storage and retrieval, which I supposed I could do directly with a database connection. But this would result in a lot of duplicate work, and there are some actual procedural calls in the web service that I would still have to support somehow, perhaps in a standalone executable that gets called from the VBA code.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this admittedly peculiar scenario?

Answer 1

I would create a wrapper class that was COMVisible around the generated web service proxy class. While I haven't done this for Access 97, I did exactly this to create a client for a web service to be consumed in a classic ASP (JavaScript) application and it worked just fine.

Answer 2

You could try one of the older Office Web Services Toolkits.

The Web Service References Tool is used in the Microsoft Office Visual Basic Editor to create a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) proxy class module from a selected Web Service Description Language (.wsdl) file. This proxy class can be used to connect and communicate with the web service.

The Office 2003 version of the Toolkit is here. I would try this one first (as it is newer), and use the XP version only if this one doesn't work.