Alpha Five Web Applications for Access Developers

Transcription

1 1 Alpha Five Web Applications for Access Developers by Martin Heller, VP of Education and Technology, Alpha Software While Access 2010 builds on the strengths of previous versions of Access for desktop applications, many developers have been looking for better alternatives for web-enabling their Access databases. One such alternative is to use Alpha Five, which can use the existing Access database directly and allow you to build web applications from it quickly and easily. In this white paper, you will learn how to move a Microsoft Access desktop application to the Web with Alpha Five. You ll see how easy it can be, and when you re done you ll understand the process well enough to undertake it yourself. This paper is intended to be a hands-on tutorial. You ll get the most out of it if you follow all the steps on your own computer. Working with an Access Database from Alpha Five Let s start by showing you some of the things you can do with an existing Access database from Alpha Five, using Northwind.mdb as an example. Install Alpha Five Before you can begin, you need to have Alpha Five installed on your computer. It has to be a Windows computer, or at least a Windows environment running on another computer (say, on a Macintosh running Boot Camp, Parallels or VMWare Fusion), and the Windows version should be Windows XP or later, including Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows 2008 Server. Open your favorite Web browser and browse to Fill out the form and click the Download Free Trial button. Now you can download and save the Alpha Five installer by clicking on the download link. When the download completes, run the saved installer, and accept all the defaults. If you have already bought a license for Alpha Five and have also bought the Flying Start Genie Feature Pack, enter and activate it now; otherwise, proceed with the free 30-day trial. Should you find that you need more than 30 days to complete your evaluation, you may contact Alpha Software for an extension.

2 2 Connect to the Northwind Access Sample Start Alpha Five and create a new, empty database in a new directory of your choice. My Documents\Alpha Five V11\NorthwindAccess\ was my choice for the folder, and Northwind was my choice for the database file name (actually the master project name, as Alpha Five projects are managed from an ADB database). From Windows Explorer, copy Northwind.mdb to this directory from C:\Program Files (x86)\ a5v11\mdbfiles\ on a 64-bit system or C:\Program Files\a5V11\MDBFiles\ on a 32-bit system. Note: For a more complete introduction to Alpha Five V11 that covers the material in this section with copious illustrations, see Chapter 1 of the Alpha Five V10 Web Tutorial. Now we are going to create a connection to the Northwind database that we can use later to build web components and reports. Switch back to Alpha Five. Open the Web Projects Control Panel if it is not already open; if doesn t have focus, select it. If you get a Startup Control Panel dialog, check the box that tells Alpha Five to always Open the Web Control Panel when this Database is opened and press OK. Pick the Edit Manage Connection Strings AlphaDAO Connection strings menu item from the Alpha Five menu bar. You ll see the AlphaDAO Connections dialog.

3 3 Click on New at the bottom of the dialog. You ll see the New AlphaDAO Connection dialog. Click on the Build button, and you ll see the Create SQL Connection String dialog. The Access connection type should be selected by default. Click on the folder icon of the File Name field and select Northwind.mdb. Test the connection: it should say Succeeded. Click OK to get back to the New AlphaDAO Connection dialog. In the Connection Name field, type nwa (a short mnemonic for Northwind Access). Now click OK to save the named connection string, and Close to dismiss the AlphaDAO Connections dialog.

4 4 When you start working with your own Access database, the process will be much the same. If you like, create a second connection string in this project for your own database, saved under a name that is meaningful to you. You can either navigate to the current location of the database when you create the connection string, or copy the database to a working folder (so that you can t corrupt the original), such as the My Documents\Alpha Five V10\Northwind Access\ folder to which we copied Northwind.mdb.

5 5 Create a grid against the Customers table Select the Web Components filter of the Web Projects Control Panel and press the New button. Select Web Component, press Next, and select Grid. Press OK, select SQL, select Create Grid Component from a Template, select Grid with Updateable Detail View (SQL), and uncheck Open help window.

6 6 Press OK. In the Grid Builder, select the named nwa connection and connect to it. Select Table or View and the Customers table.

7 7 Select the Component Type and check Grid contains a Search part.

8 8 Select Grid Fields, select the CustomerID, CompanyName, City, and Country fields, and add them to the Grid using the > button. Select Search Fields, select the CompanyName, City, and Country fields, and add them to the Search part using the > button.

9 9 Select Detail View Fields, select all the fields but the last two, and add them to the Detail View part using the > button. Click on the Working Preview tab to see what we ve done so far. This view is completely live, so you can scroll through the tabular grid, search the customers, view the details for any customer (by clicking on the underlined CustomerID field), and edit the current detail view. Press the Save button in the top toolbar, and call this grid Cust1.

10 10 Create a row expander drilldown for Orders Wouldn t it be nice to drill down in a given customer to see the related orders? We can do this easily by creating a grid for Orders and adding it to Cust1 as a row expander. Switch to the Web Projects Control Panel and create a new Grid component. This time, make it a Read-only Grid (SQL), and choose the Orders table. Pick all of the fields except the last two.

11 11 Switch to the Working Preview tab. Save this as Ord1. Switch to the Cust1 grid builder Design tab Grid Properties. Scroll around halfway down (or search for row expander ) and check Has row expander.

12 12 Open Row expander linked Grids using the button at the right of the property. Add grid Ord1 with parent field CustomerID linked to child field CustomerID.

13 13 Click OK, save the grid, and switch to the Working Preview pane. Now you should be able to click on any plus sign to drill down to the orders for a customer. Note that we could have defined multiple grids to display in the row expander; they would be organized by tabs. We could also define a row expander for the child grid on the Orders table, to open a grandchild of the Customers table. We ll demonstrate another capability instead. Create a linked content area for Order Details and Employees A linked content area is another place for a linked grid. Rather than opening below the current row, the linked content area opens in one of the four Freeform Edit Regions above, below, left, and right of the grid. For this exercise, we ll open two linked grids in the region below the Orders grid. Create a new read-only grid against the Order_Details_Extended view in Northwind, and

14 14 add all but the last two fields to the grid. Preview this and save it as Ord_det_ext1. Create another new read-only grid against the Employees table in Northwind, and add all but the last five fields to the grid. Preview this and save it as Emp1. Open grid Ord1 for editing, view the grid properties, scroll down to the Linked Grids/Content section, and check Has linked Grids or other content. Click on the button to the right of the property. In the Linked Content Builder, click Add Linked Content Section, and call the section ORD. Click Define Linked Content, and add the grids Ord_det_ext1 (linked on OrderID) and Emp1 (linked on EmployeeID) to the section. Set the Initial Grid number to display to 1. Press OK. Press the Edit Freeform Edit Region button, and bring up the Bottom region. Double-click on the ORD section to add it to the region.

15 15 Press OK twice, save your Ord1 grid, and view it in Working Preview. You will see the two grids in the linked content area below the grid. The linked grid content will change with the selected order, and you can click on the tabs to view each linked grid.

16 16 Now open your Cust1 grid and look at its Working preview. Remember, Cust1 already had Ord1, which we just modified, in its row expander. Expand a row and you will be able to drill down from a customer to the customer s orders to an individual order and the employee who took the order.

17 17 Pretty neat, don t you think? There is nothing keeping you from, say, adding a row expander to Ord_det_ext1 to show Products, linked on ProductID. The grids can easily follow the relations in the database for a natural data browsing experience. This would be a good time to try to create some grids against your own Access database. Identify some parent-child-grandchild relationships and create row expanders or linked grids for drilldowns. Don t overdo it later in this paper we ll learn a shortcut for building grids against tables and views. While we have barely scratched the surface of what can be done with Alpha Five grids, let s move on and show you how to generate a report.

18 18 Create a report for Sales by Category The Northwind database already contains a number of useful queries (called views in Alpha Five and in most databases other than Access). We used one in a grid, Order_Details_Extended. Let s use another, Sales by Category, to create a report. Start by switching to the Control Panel in Alpha Five, and selecting the Reports tab. Press the New button, press OK in the New Report dialog to select <SQL Data Source>, and in the Configure DataSource dialog select the nwa connection string and press Next. Select Sales by Category from the Tables/Views dropdown and check *(all columns). You will see a SQL Select statement generated for you.

19 19 Press Finish, then OK. Check Use the Report Genie.

20 20 Press OK. Call the report Sales by Category. Drop down Groups with Totals, double-click on CategoryName, Productname and Productsales as fields, double-click on CategoryName as the only group, order by Productname, and create a Running total summary for Productsales. In Options, make titles bold, make fields italic, and put page numbers, day/ date, and center titles on each page. An initial report layout layout will be generated. Save it as salesbycat. Print preview the report using the fifth item on the toolbar. As you ll see, this is a good start at a report.

21 21 This report could be improved by fixing the formatting of the dollar amounts for sales and by editing some of the legends from the default field name, for example changing Productname to Product Name. The formatting of dollar amounts is easily done using the docked Properties pane for each field. The Productsales detail needs to have 2 decimal places, not 4, a $ in its format, and be right-aligned. The Product_G1 and Product_GG totals need a $ in their formats. The editing of the detail header can be done right on the report design. The editing of the running totals can be done most conveniently by right-clicking on PRODUCT_T1 and PRODUCT_TG, bringing up their full properties dialogs, and editing their field expressions. Now we have a fully acceptable report.

22 22 You can print this report if you like. You can also run this report from a web page and display it online, as we ll see in the next section. If you d like to try building an Alpha Five report against your own Access database, this would be a good time to do it. Create a Tabbed User Interface for the grid and report The Tabbed User Interface (UI) builder is a quick way to create the overall navigation user interface of an application. It can tie together your disparate Alpha Five components, A5W pages, HTML pages, external URI pages, reports, and PDF documents into a unified application where buttons bring up their associated elements in tabs. You can use tabs, accordions, frames, and containers to organize your buttons. Let s quickly create a Tabbed User Interface for the grids and report we ve already saved. In your Web control panel click the New button. In the New File dialog, pick the Web Component icon. Press Next and pick the Tabbed UI Builder icon. Press OK and you will see the Tabbed UI Builder Overview.

23 23 Switch to the Tabbed UI Controls section and look at the three accordions Tabbed UI Buttons, Containers, and Other Controls. In the Tabbed UI Buttons accordion, click on Grid Component and add your Cust1 grid. Then click on Report and add your salesbycat report.

24 24 Save your Tabbed UI as TabUI1. Now turn on the Alpha Five Application Server (click the red button on the Alpha Five toolbar and watch it turn green) and then switch to the Live Preview tab of the TabUI1 designer. Click on the Cust1 button and your grid will open in the first tab. If you press the salesbycat button, most likely a second tab will open, a Working message will display inside the tab, and an Adobe Reader window will open separately, containing your report. Exactly how this works depends on your computer s configuration. It is worthwhile clicking on one or more of the browser buttons at the bottom of the Live Preview pane to see your Tabbed UI previewed in one or more web browsers. If you created grids and/or reports for your own Access database, this would be a good time to build a Tabbed UI for them.

25 25 Create a Page Layout with accordions for the grid and report A Page Layout component is very similar to a Tabbed User Interface. Both can tie together your disparate Alpha Five components, A5W pages, HTML pages, external URI pages, reports, and PDF documents into a unified application. Both let you use tabs, accordions, frames, and containers to organize content. The big difference between the two is that the Tabbed UI must be the master interface for an A5W page. A Page Layout is an ordinary Alpha Five component, so it can be contained in a tab of a Tabbed UI; it can also be placed on an A5W page. That isn t to say that you can t have more than one Tabbed User Interface in an application. You can use more than one Tabbed UI by putting them on different pages. You can tie those pages together into a larger web application in a number of different ways. You an even nest a page containing a Tabbed User Interface in a tab of another Tabbed User Interface but it ll look best if one has buttons on the left and the other has buttons on the right. Let s create a Page Layout. Start by creating a new Page Layout Builder web component. The layout of the builder will look familiar from the Tabbed UI Builder. Note in the description that the content on a page can be contained in tab, accordion, frame, and container controls. For simplicity, let s start by putting two simple grids, Emp1 and Ord_det_ext1, in accordions. You create an Accordion control by creating a Tab Control and switching it to an Accordion. You separate the Accordions with Tab Panes.

26 26 Preview this and you ll initially see just the unopened Accordion controls. If you open one Accordion, you ll see the grid inside. If you open the other Accordion, the first will close. There will be a short delay as each Accordion is opened for the first time, but switching back and forth takes hardly any time at all. Save this page layout as PL1. See what happens if you set one pane to open by default, and if you allow multiple panes to be open. Try different layouts, using Tabs, Frames, and Containers. Experiment with having grids open when a button is pressed in a Frame or Container instead of opening automatically. Save any of these that you like under different names. Also try including multiple Page Layouts in a single Tabbed UI.

27 27 This would be a good time to create some page layouts for your own Access database. Run the Flying Start Genie I promised earlier that we d learn a shortcut for building grids against tables and views. That shortcut is Alpha Five s Flying Start Genie. If you are using a trial version of Alpha Five, the Flying Start Genie will be enabled by default; otherwise, you will need to purchase the Flying Start Genie Feature Pack to do this exercise yourself. From the Web Projects Control Panel, create a new Flying Start Genie: Connect to the Northwind database through your nwa connection:

28 28 For this exercise, select all the tables in the database, which is most easily done by using the filter to suppress the display of views, and then pressing the >> icon. Go to the Finish tab, and click Finish. Save the settings if you wish. After some delay, a Tabbed UI will display in your default browser with all your tables in tabs.

29 29 Each grid will use the default global settings for the Flying Start Genie, since we did not change the global settings or override them for any of the tables. The Global Properties pane, which we skipped, shows the options. By default, each grid shows the first five fields, the initially hidden search part works on the same five fields, and the detail part shows all fields of types that can be automatically generated in a modal popup window. If you look at the Products tab, you ll see that the image field in this table has not been displayed. (It is an OLE BMP image, if you want to add it yourself.)

30 30 Each of the generated grids can be duplicated and edited to your heart s content. You ve already seen how to create row expanders and linked grids, but there are many other options available to you. Publish your work locally We have been viewing our work in Working Preview and Live Preview modes, but we have not published anything we ve created so that others can see it. When we did a Live Preview, we had to turn on the Alpha Five Application Server; the Live Preview mode automatically published to a special Live Preview folder on the server, and you were able to view it from a browser on your development computer as well as from your Alpha Five development environment. Even if you don t have an Application Server license, other people can view your work but only for 30 minutes at a time. They can see your Live Preview directory, but you should also

31 31 learn how to publish your whole web application. From your Web Projects Control Panel, press the Publish toolbar button. Now press the Edit icon to the right of the profile dropdown.

32 32 Change the Target Folder to <Default>. As described in the micro-help at the bottom of the screen, <Default> causes the project to be published to a folder named based on the current database and project, in our case Northwind/Default. Press OK. In the Publish Web Project dialog, check Publish Database Library so that we can view our report, check Launch browser after files are published, and select TabbedUI_TabUI1. a5w from the pages to show. Press Publish. If you are asked to publish Web Security Users and Groups Data, say No. If you are asked to create c:\ A5Webroot\Northwind\ Default, say Yes. After some activity you should see the Tabbed User Interface we built earlier appear in your default web browser. On my machine, the URL of this page is Northwind/Default/ TabbedUI_TabUI1.a5w. On your machine, the port is most likely 80, which is the default and will not be displayed. You should be able be view the page from other computers on your LAN for 30 minutes. If your computer is at IP address , and the port is 80, then the URL of this page will be TabUI1.a5w. Why didn t we see all our components listed? It is because, so far at least, the only saved A5W pages we have created were automatically generated by the Tabbed UI Builder.

33 33 Why were we able to preview components without creating A5W pages? When Alpha Five does a Live Preview for a component, it automatically generates a temporary A5W page on which to display the component. When it does a Working Preview for a component, it automatically generates a temporary desktop dialog on which to display the component. Create Additional A5W Pages If you want to generate more A5W pages, it is as easy as going to the A5W Pages section of the Web Projects Control Panel, pressing New, creating a Blank Page or a Page from Layout Template, saving the page with a name, adding text, and inserting components in the appropriate places. You may also press Save Page when editing a web component to create a new A5W page that contains that component; when the page opens in the HTML editor after saving, you can add whatever text and HTML layout that you like. Add Web Security While we are not going to demonstrate the Alpha Five Web Security system in this paper, you should know that it exists and what it can do. The Web Security Framework easily adds a sophisticated security system to any web application running on the Alpha Five Application Server. The security system is integrated into the server operation. When the security framework is turned on, the server automatically checks every requested page or file for proper security clearance from information saved in memory. The server checks the page or file permission and will return the requested file if it is permitted within the security framework for the project containing the file. If the page or file is not allowed, the server automatically checks the security configuration to determine the proper response. This process is repeated for every page and file request, including images, CSS style sheets, and JavaScript files. If a field on a component is not available to the user, the Application Server will remove it from the component on the page returned to the user. If a menu entry is not available to the user, its link will be disabled. This is discussed at cation+security+framework.

34 34 What s different about the Web? We ve covered quite a lot of things that you can do with an Access database from Alpha Five. Now we re going to explain why you might want to upsize your Access database for Web use, and how to go about it. There are several considerations to bear in mind when you are moving an Access desktop database to the Web. First of all, a Web application can potentially have a very large number of total users, and a moderately large number of simultaneous users. This means that record locking and overall scalability are very important for Web applications, even more so than for desktop LAN applications. Second, a Web application incurs a delay every time there is a round trip between the browser and the Web server. This means that performance can be improved by minimizing the amount of page refresh using Ajax techniques, and that user frustration can be mitigated by displaying progress indicators for operations that can take more than a second. You have already seen that in action with Alpha Five s Ajax Grids and Tabbed UI. Third, a Web application incurs a delay when executing database queries and downloading the result sets. This means that techniques such as lazy loading, data pre-fetch, data paging and data caching can make a big difference in the performance of the application. This also reinforces the need to display progress indicators. You may have heard of people using Access databases directly from Web applications. We don t recommend this! The primary reason is that Access databases don t support high numbers of simultaneous users or tables with large numbers of rows very gracefully. As you ve seen, it can be done from Alpha Five Web applications, at least for small number of users. (We don t recommend using Alpha s native DBF format database for Web applications, either, primarily for scalability reasons.) For web use, we recommend a SQL database that s designed to be a server. Access is a SQL database, but it is not designed to be a server. Alpha Five supports many SQL databases that are designed as servers, including Caché, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase SQL Anywhere, and Sybase SQL Server. Microsoft SQL Server is the database most frequently offered by hosting providers on Windows-based Web server accounts. Other SQL databases can work just as well. If you are on a budget, hosting your own database, and don t need paid database support, consider Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition, MySQL Community Edition, or PostgreSQL (either the PostgreSQL Core distribution or Postgres Plus Standard Server), all of which are free.

35 35 How to Upsize your Access Database to a Scalable SQL Database Check your database schema in Access Before you go to the work of moving the database from Access, you should review the schema. In Access 2007 or later, you can see a database diagram by selecting Relationships from the Database Tools ribbon: You can view the details for any table on the diagram by right-clicking on the table and selecting Table Design:

36 36 What you re trying to determine at this point is whether the database schema will make sense for the Web application. There may be tables that you don t want to import at all: it would be helpful to know that before you go to the effort of importing them. There may be missing relationships, or badly normalized tables, or missing primary keys. One Access tool you can use at this point is the Analyze Table wizard on the Database Tools ribbon, which will detect some common problems. If there are problems, you have two basic choices about fixing the schema: get it right in Access now, or get it right in the SQL database later, with the help of Alpha Five and any other tools you have for the SQL database. You can also combine the two. If you attempt to fix the schema in Access, make sure that you preserve a copy of your original Access database somewhere safe. We don t recommend fixing everything in Access, but you should probably fix any serious normalization problems if you can, and make sure that the data you migrate has relational integrity. It s very important for SQL databases to be properly normalized; to have unique primary keys for all tables; to have foreign key constraints for all relationships; and to have indexes on all fields used as foreign keys. If none of this makes sense, you may want to refer to the Johansen

37 37 book listed in the For more information section of this paper for advice on database design. If you determine in Step 0 that you need to start over with a better database design, then Step 1 outlined here will not apply. Instead, you ll want to design the new schema, and then import data selectively from the Access database tables to your new SQL database design. Once this is complete, you can proceed with Step 2. Migrate your Access database to your SQL database Before you can start working with Alpha to build a Web application, you need to import your database schema and your data to the database engine you re planning to use from the Web. We re targeting Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for this example. We ll start by discussing the generic process, which will also work for other SQL databases. Import and Export using Alpha Five Access, navigate to the northwind.mdb file that we copied earlier. For purposes of this example, we re using the venerable Access 2003 version of the Northwind sample database that ships with Alpha Five. Start Alpha Five, and from the Select Database dialog s Database & Tasks tab pick Create a database from imported data. In the dropdown box for Click the OK button, and then select a location and name for your new Alpha database. These choices are relatively unimportant; we ll throw away the Alpha database once we ve exported it to SQL Server.

38 38 Select all the tables to import, and none of the other assets: When the import operation is complete, you ll see a status screen:

39 39 This database import had no errors. If you encounter an error, you can go back to the Access database and fix the problem, delete the partially imported Alpha database, and try the import again. If you don t understand the error message, you might want to ask about it on the Alpha Forums. When you re done, you ll see your imported tables on the Tables/Sets tab of the Alpha Five control panel: You can view the imported data in the tables using Alpha Five s default browse:

40 40 Now, we can export the tables and data to SQL Server: At this point, we re defining the SQL database connection and the tables to export. We ll be connecting to the SQL database via AlphaDAO:

41 41 If your SQL database isn t already running, start it now. You ll have to drill down a few levels to get to the Create SQL Connection String dialog, where you can select the correct type of database, select the actual server, select or create the database, and test the connection: It s useful at this point to save the connection string from the Connection String dialog. We used the name nwtest.

42 42 With that done, you can open the Alpha database and the target database simultaneously in the AlphaDAO Export Genie, and select all the tables for export: When you close the Genie, you ll have the opportunity to save the export operation configuration: we called it nwtest:

43 43 Now we can run the export operation, and see the results: Using the Alpha Five SQL Explorer, we can now view the tables in the SQL database through the nwtest connection:

44 44 From the context menu that pops up on a right mouse click, we can choose to show the data in the SQL table: That data, thankfully, looks just like it did in the original Access database and the intermediate Alpha database:

45 45 This is a success as far as it has gone:

46 46 What s wrong with this SQL Server Management Studio database diagram? The tables are present in SQL Server, and the rows, but there are no primary keys, no foreign keys, no relations, and no indexes. If you know what you re doing, it s a matter of a few minutes to add all of these from the diagram view. We also haven t migrated the Access queries to SQL Server views; that is a straightforward copy and paste operation if you know how to look at the query definitions in Access and define them in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio or Microsoft Visual Studio. Access-to-SQL Server specific migration The main advantage of the data migration method that we just demonstrated is that it will work with any SQL database supported by Alpha Five, not just Microsoft SQL Server. However, there are two methods available from Microsoft that may capture more of the database assets for the specific case of an Access database moving to SQL Server: the Access SQL Server upsizing wizard and SSMA for Access. The Access SQL Server upsizing wizard We ll walk through the Access SQL Server upsizing wizard very briefly. In Access 2007, open the Northwind 2007 sample, and go to the Database Tools ribbon. In the Move Data group, click on SQL Server. The upsizing wizard will open: accept the default option, Create new database, and click on Next. The next screen is where it may start to get hairy. The SQL Server instance you use must have SQL Server authentication mode enabled, and you must have a login that has CREATE DATABASE privilege. If you try to use an instance of SQL Server 2008, once you log in successfully you may get the baffling error message: This was a bug in early versions Access 2007, still present as of 12/2008. It has been fixed in later versions, including the late Access 2007 service packs. If you use an instance of a supported version SQL Server and have the correct privileges, it works fairly well, and you wind up with a database that has all the tables, data, relations, primary keys, and indexes:

47 47 You don t want to change the Access application: As you can see in this diagram, the SQL Server database can be ready to go immediately after the Upsizing Wizard completes:

48 48 SQL Server Migration Assistant for Access (SSMA for Access) The SQL Server team at Microsoft also produces an upsizing wizard of its own, called SQL Server Migration Assistant for Access (SSMA for Access). There are multiple versions of SSMA listed at Since this page includes copious instructions, readmes, FAQs, white papers, and case studies, we won t belabor the process here. It s certainly worth trying, assuming that your Access database is in good shape. Using your SQL Database from Alpha Five Using your SQL Database from Alpha Five is almost exactly like using your Access database from Alpha Five. The only difference is the connection string: instead of having a connection string for an Access file, you have a connection string for a SQL Server. On the machine I m currently using, mhphenom, I have a SQL Server Express instance that contains a copy of Northwind. (I think I created this copy from Microsoft s instnwnd.sql script, which you can download from Microsoft.com here.) When I open mhphenom\sqlexpress in SQL Server Management Studio using Windows Authentication, I can see all the tables and views. When I create a database diagram for Northwind, I see the correct relations set up between the tables. When I look at the Indexes for a table, I see all the correct fields being indexed.

49 49 Armed with that knowledge, I can create a connection string for Northwind on SQL Server in my Northwind Alpha Five project. After bringing the Control Panel to the foreground, I select the Tools External Databases AlphaDAO Connection Strings menu item. In the AlphaDAO Connections dialog, I add a new connection. After testing the connection successfully, I refresh the database dropdowns and select Northwind. I save this as nw sql. Note that your connection string will be slightly different depending on the location and instance name of your database.

50 50 I can use this to create new grids and reports, and I can switch connection strings in my existing tables and reports without changing the rest if the artifact, but even more conveniently I can use this information to create a new publication target for my Alpha Five project that automatically substitutes the contents of this connection string for the normal contents of the nwa connection string that we originally used for all our components and reports. From the Web Projects Control Panel press the Publish button and open the Publish Web Project dialog. Open the Web Project Profiles dialog using the edit icon. Now press the Add New Profile button to bring up the New Publishing Profile genie. Right now we re going to publish locally, but this process is very similar to what you d do to publish to your LAN or to an ISP. I am calling my new Application Folder NWSS.

51 51 We need to pick a default page (for convenience) and publish our library files (so that the report will work).

52 52 Save the profile as nwss. Here s the magic step: examine the nw sql connection string in the Local Webroot profile:

53 53 Now edit the nwa string in the nwss profile to be the same SQL connection string.

54 54 Save that, start your Application Server, and publish the nwss profile. If all goes well you will see your Tabbed UI with grids and reports working against the SQL Server Northwind database in your default browser.

55 55 If you view the other tabbed UI on your site, with the Flying Start Genie results, you ll see that all of those grids work, too.

56 56 If you d like to verify that the NWSS site is actually working against the SQL Server connection string, view the C:\A5Webroot\NWSS\a5_application.a5i file in a text editor. Under AlphaDAO Connection Strings you will see that the values for nw sql Encrypted and nwa Encrypted are identical. Summary In this paper we have demonstrated a few of the web components and reports that you can build easily against an Access database with Alpha Five V10.5 or later. We have learned how to upsize an Access database to SQL Server or another scalable SQL database, and we have seen how easy it is to make the same components built against an Access database work against an upsized SQL Server database with the same schema. What s keeping you from giving the same treatment to your own Access data? For more information Web sites Alpha Software Web site, Alpha Five and Access Web site, asp Alpha Software blog, We have published several interviews with former Access developers who have migrated to Alpha Five, as well as articles covering many of the issues Access developers are facing today with the release of Access There is also a comprehensive comparison grid that shows you how Access stacks up against Alpha Five and other popular database development platforms. You can continue your reading and research on our blog at the following links: Alpha Software forums, Alpha Five online documentation wiki, Books and Training videos

57 57 In This Whitepaper Working with an Access Database from Alpha Five... 1 Install Alpha Five... 1 Connect to the Northwind Access Sample... 2 Create a grid against the Customers table... 5 Create a row expander drilldown for Orders...10 Create a linked content area for Order Details and Employees...13 Create a report for Sales by Category...18 Create a Tabbed User Interface for the grid and report...22 Create a Page Layout with accordions for the grid and report...25 Run the Flying Start Genie...27 Publish your work locally...30 Create Additional A5W Pages...33 Add Web Security...33 How to Upsize your Access Database to a Scalable SQL Database...35 Check your database schema in Access...35 Migrate your Access database to your SQL database...37 Import and Export using Alpha Five...37 Access-to-SQL Server specific migration...46 Using your SQL Database from Alpha Five...48 Summary...56 For more information...56 Web sites...56 Books and Training videos...56