2 Programmers, 1 MDB. Possible? 1

[adamstuff]

Hi all,
I think the subject says it. I have two people working on one MDB, sometimes at the same time. We've already lost some time becase of miscommunication. Is there a way to allow them to work on it at the same time (shared, as in excel)or some way to lock the other one out when one is working in it.
TIA

Heisenberg was probably right.

 

[PCLewis]

No.

If you need to allow both people to work on the same modules at the same time then you are ruined. You cannot do it unless they sit on the same chair and use the same keyboard/mouse

If you want them to work on different modules/classes/forms then you could make two copies of the MDB for the developers, and have a mchanism of importing the changed objects into a master version after each person has completed their work.

This approach would be acceptable in my view however, your communication would be paramount. You would need to ensure that each developer stuck to his or her own objects and did not make any changes to the other developer's objects (or no changes that they wanted to keep).

Perhaps a better approach is to write some code to export all objects (check out the SaveAsText command!) to files, then use conventional version control software to manage these files. You can go far with this method but it's slightly more tedious to manage. Much safer though. You'd have to check out the objects in your version control app, then import them with loadfromtext. This means they overwrite the existing object of the same name. Once you are done developing, you would have a function that "savesastext" each of the files you previously loaded (for checking back in to version control) and perhaps you could have it warn the user about all of the objects they modified that wer enot originally loaded.

I think you get what I mean anyhow. It's all feasible - safer than relying solely on communication because you are using proven version control techniques.


To be honest though, I have never worked on an access application with other people so I don't know if Soruce Safe or any of the other version control suites help here. My guess is that they treat an MDB as a binary file so you lose out on most of their features. At least the second suggestion I made allows some version history capability.

 

[adamstuff]

Thanks PCLewis,
That's what I was afraid of, seeing that the MDB is only one file. Having spent a lot of time in FoxPro, the limitations of Access are becoming very apparent. I definitely appreciate your response. It will save several hours of me pounding my head trying to figure it out. Since I have time constraints, I'll just have to be very careful with version control.
Thanks again!

Heisenberg was probably right.