Visual Basic/Access program troubles

UncleSporky

I've been working on a project on my computer for part of this semester. It's a simple incident database/log for our campus safety since their old one sucks donkey balls. All I've made is a simple Visual Basic form for entering data that interfaces with an Access database for storing records and also the lookup tables for valid entries (type of incident, location on campus, etc.). I don't care if using VB and/or Access was stupid at this point, it mostly works just fine. I must finish this and turn it in Monday or I don't graduate on time.

My biggest problem right now is how I'm going to transfer the program to the campus network. The database has just been on my desktop as I wrote the program, and when I tried to show my progress to a prof the other day on his computer, it freaked out and wouldn't work because the database wasn't in the exact same place as on my computer. I had to work around it by recreating the same directory in his Documents and Settings folder. Obviously this isn't going to work when putting it on the network.

I've looked around a bit for a way to fix this problem and found nothing. I thought it'd be as easy as finding an option somewhere and changing the directory listed, but I haven't seen anything like that. Anybody ever had this problem, where you can't move your data source from where the program is used to it being?

Also I still have a lot of work to do tomorrow on the actual program itself. Anybody know anything about Crystal Reports?

Going to bed soon, thanks in advance for your help.

Jasconius

You link to an access database just like you would like to a image file, or anything else. Visual Studio and other Microsoft programs have a stupid habit of creating hard links to files relative to the drive if you use a wizard or tool to implement them.

Go in to wherever you connect to your database, and remove all the extra pieces of the path, it should work.

As far as reports, you don't really *need* Crystal reports, Access has reports built into it, and probably will do for a school assignment.

UncleSporky

Jasconius wrote: »

You link to an access database just like you would like to a image file, or anything else. Visual Studio and other Microsoft programs have a stupid habit of creating hard links to files relative to the drive if you use a wizard or tool to implement them.

Go in to wherever you connect to your database, and remove all the extra pieces of the path, it should work.

As far as reports, you don't really *need* Crystal reports, Access has reports built into it, and probably will do for a school assignment.

I was going to try that but I couldn't find any paths to the database like that. Someone on a different forum told me I need to modify the connection string to the database, which I think would most convenienetly be done through an open dialog box in case the file needs to be moved in the future.

I will be looking into this, but if anyone else has experience with this and could give me more specific instructions, I'd be very grateful.

Jasconius

What language are you using?

If it's classic ASP then your connection string is likely in an include file or subroutine near the top of your page.

You don't need to make an input field for the path if the file path is relative to your page... it's breaking because it's going all the way out to the drive letter, then pathing its way back.