Anyone know how to use PHP to write an .mdb file for Access?

jtown

Just wondering if anyone has done this or has a quick link to some code that works.

Thanks!

thorpe

You'd need to do it throuigh COM. Best bet would be to search on some asp site, or over at the http://msdn.com.

jtown

Are there any prexisting modules?

barand

Or you could set up and ODBC link and use PHP ODBC functions

http://us3.php.net/odbc

MarkR

You can do it on win32 provided you use ODBC to write it.

Beware of locking conflicts / deadlocks - Jet is not suitable for general use in a web application. Ideally, you should only write one file by one thread at once to avoid lockups or failures.

If you're not on win32, you need some third party stuff - expect to pay for it.

Mark

barand

I agree, I wouldn't recommend Access for any use other than as a personal database, and certainly not for more than a handful of users.

Jack_Sparrow

Jtown,

do you want to write an .mdb file for Access

do you want to write TO an .mdb file for Access ?

There's a big difference. If you want to write TO an .mdf file then you need some sort of odbc connection. If I were you I wouldn't waste my time ... there's much better databases out there.

If you want to write an .mdf file for Access, then you need to figure out what the internal format of an .mdf file is. No clue there and i don't know if this is documented or not. Try Google.

Good luck,

Jack

jtown

Jack Sparrow wrote:
Jtown,

do you want to write an .mdb file for Access

or

do you want to write TO an .mdb file for Access ?

There's a big difference. If you want to write TO an .mdf file then you need some sort of odbc connection. If I were you I wouldn't waste my time ... there's much better databases out there.

If you want to write an .mdf file for Access, then you need to figure out what the internal format of an .mdf file is. No clue there and i don't know if this is documented or not. Try Google.

Good luck,

Jack

Thanks for all the replies guys. For my purposes I need to write a .mdb file. My users use access to look at the data and I just want them to be able to download a .mdb from the site and be able to open it up in Access. The site uses mysql for it's db.

MarkR

Well, the way to do it is to use ODBC to write to a database. Make a "skeleton" database with MSAccess, then have PHP make a copy, write the necessary data to it then serve that to the user.

If you're on win32 you can do this fairly easily but it may adversely affect the stability of your web server.

If you're not on win32, expect to have to buy a third party component (as I suggested before)

Mark