Dynamic Reports on Intranet

[GPM4663]

Hi everyone,
I want to take a number of reports from a database and publish them on our company intranet - I'm trying to develop a kind of business dashboard. I need the reports to update though whenever the page is opened or refreshed and I would like it to be quite fast. This is only for an Intranet and will not be used on the web. I'm unsure whether I should be looking at Active Server Pages or Data Access Pages or something else. I've never used either of them before and don't want to go down the wrong road. The data to be displayed will not need to be manipulated at the intranet level only viewed. Any advice anyone could give would really be appreciated.

Many thanks

GPM

 

[Stevehewitt]

I'll be honest, I spent a little bit of time trying to do this and gave up. Unless you are proficient in ASP or other web languages then it's a reasonable amount of work.

I always through that it would be possible to have access automatically export reports on a timer, but it would mean having access open on a server or something, and then spitting the report out in HTML to a web directory every minute or something.

I ended up using GenericDB which is so easy to use and free.

http://www.genericdb.com.

It's not really for reports, but if your DB tables are structured properly then can you do searches on the database. (And delete, add edit etc. although they can all be disabled.)

Good Luck,


Steve.

 

[FancyPrairie]

I've done a few forms using DAPs and despite some problems, am pleased with them. And if you know Access, then learning curve is pretty small.

With that said, why couldn't you have your web form, launch Access (which would reside on the server) via a macro that would open a report and save it as a snapshot file. Then display the snapshot file on the intranet page.

 

[Stevehewitt]

FancyPraire

I didn't realise that DAP provided reporting abilities - I thought it was just a cack handed version of basic data inputting without a lot of normal functionality of a real Access form! Guess I wasn't looking in the right place!

Would you mind pointing me to where or how I would go about looking into this?

Thanks,

Steve

 

[GPM4663]

Fancy Praire,
Thanks for the info, I really appreciate it! Do I have to create the DAP from scratch or can I export a form/report as one? I know access really well but have always steered clear of the DAPs out of fear but if you think it's easy enough to pick up I'll give it a go. I had set up the intranet to do as you suggested with opening access but it is quite slow on opening the db and also I would have to deal with the "do you want to open or save this file..." dialog boxes etc in html when you click on the link. I've had a number of problems launching access through IE5 on different computers.

Any further info you could point me to on DAPs would be really useful