Question Looking up information from the web (e.g. Facebook profile pic, ZIP, etc.)

[dnlbrky]

I have an Access 2010 table with information about my contacts. I would like to show their Facebook profile picture in an Access form. I can store the FB usernames or IDs, and generate a link to the pictures (https :// graph.facebook.com/username/picture?type=large). How can I either store the picture in the table, or have Access fetch and display the picture when the form is opened?

Also, I would like to validate the US postal address of each contact, get the full ZIP code, etc. The USPS site can do this, but I'm not sure how to query the site from Access and get the results back. See the example URL below (which I can easily create within Access, using each address in the table):

https :// tools.usps.com/go/ZipLookupResultsAction!input.action?resultMode=0&address1=1600+Pennsylvania+Avenue&city=Washington&state=DC​

Thanks!

 

[GinaWhipp]

Images...

You would need fetch those pictures and put them on your harddrive. Access does not link to an image and then place it in a field in a table or on your hard drive. AND you would not want it to do so as you would quickly reach the 2 gig limit. For picture/image handing see...

http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/imagehandling.htm

Postal Code Validation...

You would not be querying a site. I do this from within my database with a table holding all the postal codes and some code (or you could use a query) to verify that postal code is in that table. Unfortunately, tables like that are not free vut they do offer free updates for a year and come with other information that might be useful to you.

 

[dnlbrky]

Thanks for your reply, Gina. I searched some more and found something that seems like it would work a bit better for displaying images:

http://goo.gl/80Ery

My vba skills are lacking, so I'm having trouble adapting their example (especially how to incorporate the "Use an http:// path in a form" section at the bottom). But it looks like it should work.

For the postal code validation, I would rather not spend money and have a static table (presumably it would also be pretty large). Access 2010 has an option to link to a data service (http://goo.gl/V6rxo). This sounds like what I'd like to do, but I (and others, apparently: http://goo.gl/ll9P5) don't know how to obtain the xml connection definitions file. Have you (or has anyone) used a data service link?

 

[GinaWhipp]

I can't speak to what anyone else has done but I have not used a data service link but I did find this...

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/accessdev/thread/45e4904a-64af-40bf-bcd0-ec7e5df175a9