Connet to a DB through the WEB

I developed a CRM software in VB5 that connects to a MDB file.
Is there a way to acces this DB through the WEB.
For example:
I normaly specify in my program the path to the mdb file.
C:\Database\data.mdb

Is ther a way to specify a web address?
What solutions do I have?
It dose not matter what I have to do, I just need to know
what are my options.... any options..... so my software has
web conetivity so I can access it from anywhere.....

Thanks for any input

Santiago Torres

Can't help you with accessing your Access database through the web. If you are interested in doing this, might I suggest it is time for you to port your database to another engine.

I suggest you look at MySQL, PostGRESQL.

As Sotasty said, you could use a more web friendly database.

But if you are committed to Access (as I also am in some cases) then here are some of your options.

1-Use Terminal Services to run the application from a remote site. (this will run the application at the server - not by dragging data across the internet) Yes, you will need to know the IP address of the machine you trying to connect to, so getting a static IP address at the server would be very handy. The alternative is that the user has to be told what the ip address is and needs to adjust their settings as the ip address changes.

If you have XP then you already have terminal services - it is called Remote Desktop - explore this

2-Create a VPN again using a static or known ip address - here you could even use the exact code you use in the local area network - but be ready for misery - the way access database works is that the client gets to do the processing - consequently, the database tables will be sent across the internet at woefully slow rates (back to terminal services which runs the application at the server and only pulls back display information)

3-have the logging in users use a little remote control program which will act as though they are sitting at the server, running the program - problem is that I should think that only one at a time may be allowed to do this so it is very limited

see -
http://www.realvnc.com/what.html

Hope that gives you a couple of options

Also, what ever you do, make sure you have Record/Table locking envoked if you are running Multi-user file changes

Found this in the Code Guru articles:

Using ADO over the Internet

Hi
I faced this setuation before ..
The solution was to put some simple ASP pages on the server that run some queries against the access database. and format the result as XML (you can save it using the ADO recordset directly to the response stream)
on the client side EXE :
Get the response from the ASP page (using WinInet control for example)
then load the XML into a recordset.

And alternative is to use VB.NET and Webservices.
this will ease the setuation alot.