[plug] porting an application

[Mark Nold]

You could use a PHP DB Wrapper and talk to your Access DB through PHP so you 
can give users the old way of doing things and the new (ie: Same DB but new 
Web Interface). Then when you are happy with this change the database and you 
should be fine.

BUT beware Access SQL is diferent from most others... eg: mid(a.column,5,2) 
instead of substr(a.column,6,2) so be careful.

The biggest thing you'll have to change will be the SQL but when you are 
writting your new PHP app use single quotes instead of doubles and then 
you'll need to change functions (such as len() mid() etc) and the 
concatenator (& in Access || in Oracle ... ???? in Postgresss) but if you use 
a DB Layer you _only_ have to change the SQL. 

(I have and use a DB Abstraction Layer that modifies Oracle SQL to look like 
Access on the fly using regular expressions... i can send you a sample if you 
need it to help during transition)

Anyway i put together some stuff on basic PHP and DB Abstraction for PLUG at: 
http://www.plug.org.au/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewdownload&cid=1






On Thursday 14 February 2002 23:08, Leon Brooks wrote:
> On Thursday 14 February 2002 15:13, Jon  Miller wrote:
> > I need to know if anyone knows or have done the following:
> > We have a MS Access database program that we use for a lot of our admin
> > work, we would like to have it ported to html or whatever as to allow us
> > access to it via a web browser over the Internet.  I would like to have
> > some input as to what is needed.  I'm being told that I may have to have
> > a MS 2000 server in order to do this.
>
> Given that Access BASIC is very similar (by design) to VB, consider feeding
> the logic code to ASP2PHP and then wrapping the results in PHP. PHP has the
> advantage of running on Windows so you can prototype stuff on the same box.
> Dump the database out as a textish format, import it into PostgreSQL and
> get Access to look at that through ODBC. If you can do that, I'd say the
> rest was straightforward (not easy, just straightforward).
>
> Cheers; Leon