easy way to convert access front end to PHP? (1 Viewer)

[mattress]

Hello!
I work on the computers at a small, non-profit organization.

We have about 15 employees, and will hopefully be expanding soon.

We started out with a paid-for Access application for our employees to keep track of everything.

A new project my boss wanted to do is convert to a LAMP server.

Easy enough.
I setup a test machine with the latest Ubuntu distro.
I installed the lamp package.
I installed phpmyadmin to create all the user accounts.

I used access to split up the front end and back end.

I migrated the back end (data) to the MySQL server on the Ubuntu computer.

I have Access setup with the MySQL ODBC connector, so everything is working fine.

The last thing I have to do is convert the access front end/forms to the web. I'm assuming PHP.

Is there a simple/cheap/free solution to convert the access forms over to PHP?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Rabbie]

Not as far as I know. I think you will have to build the forms in HTML together with PHP.

 

[Banana]

Someone once showed me a program which is sorta Access-like for PHP: PHPRunner

Personally, I'm inclined to believe it's too good to be true and would really want to write it from the scratch if I knew nothing about PHP. If i was otherwise familiar with PHP, I would then read the output PHPRunner generates just so I can verify it does not do anything insane (and most of time, auto-code generator does write insane codes).

 

[dan-cat]

Web GUIs work completely differently to MS Access GUIs.

Load up a databound form in MS Access with say 10,000 records in it's datasource and consider whether you would think it a good idea to serve up the same number of records over a web connection.

MS Access gets away with it because the client is either on the same machine or on the same network and there are usually a limited number of them.

Data access is completely different on the web because of the limited network capacity. I'm with Banana, I don't believe in wizardry.

 

[Wanetom]

A direct conversion is likely to be useless, as the stateless nature of a web page means the architecture of the UI has to be completely different than the data-bound forms of an Access application. My bet is that an experienced PHP developer could get it done more quickly from scratch

 

[shaba7]

I assume you are referring to tabsheets/page controls. There is no such thing in HTML. You can mimic them using javascript and/or PHP. As well, there are no "autocomplete" combo-boxes. They will auto-search but I believe that that only works on the first character.

 

[Funkyaccess]

Might be a bit late.

but look at ORACLE Application Express(APEX) its free opensource front-end for ORACLE DB and you can migrate access db to it with a click of a button.

If you want more info then PM me or visit (http://apex.oracle.com)

 

[wiklendt]

spam reported

 

[bparker1084]

No software can effectively convert these formats because the way Access forms work is fundamentally different from how web interfaces have to work to be usable.