FrontEnd BackEnd

[olorin]

Hi there,
I have developed a DB for use at work.
I have the BackEnd on the server and the FrontEnd on my workstation.
Other people want to use the Dbase and I said I would distribute a FE to all workstations that need it.
The IT guy here says he would rather I installed the FrontEnd in a folder on the server and people could create shortcuts to it so they could use it.
I am proud of the work I have done developing the Dbase over the last 18 months, and have learned a great deal. Would someone please give me a good argument why It is better to have the FE on each workstation, rather than all people in the same FE at once.
Thanx
I could probably say something myself, but I don't like the guy and I might offend him,( work politics)

 

[boblarson]

You need to tell the IT guy that doing it the way he suggests will greatly enhance the chance of corruption of the entire system, be more of a drag on the network, and potentially have users not able to use the db if someone has their settings set to "open exclusive."

The frontend should definitely be on EACH user's machine. The reason why they don't like that when you tell them that is that they think that it will be a big pain to update everyone's machine when you have changes done to the frontend. The way around this is to enable auto updating for your front ends. You have the frontend in a master location on the network, you work on it and when you are ready to deploy, you change the version number in the frontend and backend and then the next time the user opens their frontend it tells the user that their frontend is out of date, deletes the old file, copies the new file from the network location to their machine and automatically reopens it. How do you do that?

On my website I have a free tool that I created that enables Auto Updating for any frontend. I created it because I had exactly the same problem you are experiencing while I was at a major healthcare provider.

So, here's some more ammo about the split database and the frontend being on the user's computer:
http://members.shaw.ca/AlbertKallal/Articles/split/index.htm

And the location to get my Frontend Auto Update Enabling tool (and documentation):

http://www.btabdevelopment.com/main/MyFreeAccessTools/tabid/78/Default.aspx

 

[andreas_udby]

I can't agree with Bob enough. The very point of splitting the DB is to protect the system from corruption. I've done this several times at my current worksite and don't have any problems with it.

Thanks for the update tool, Bob! That's going to come in very handy.