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[lexvis]

Hi,

First post here, I'll try to make sense ;-)

Introduction
Been fiddling around with Access for quite a while now. (always local stuff)

Recently started to look at ways to interact with MS-SQL server (2005)
Looked at ADP, and made some progress, but found out that ADP is a dead end. (should have done research first of course)
/Introduction

Now for my Question: (pls advise)

What is the best way to connect a Front-end to SQL server?
I see a lot of ODBC going on using DSN's
Are there better, more direct ways to achieve a connection for a Front-end?
Since this is a time consuming hobby I would like to bet on the right horse from the start and not make the same mistake as with trying out ADP's.

Thank you very much for any response!
Lx

 

[georgedwilkinson]

If you don't want to fiddle around with maintaining DSNs, you could go with a DSN-less ODBC connection. Banana on these forums wrote a nice little (or big) article on the why's and how's. Just search here for DSN-less and you can go into the advanced search and only search for posts by Banana.

FWIW, I'm implementing DSN-less on a 2005 installation with 60+ users right now. I just walked our front end programmer through the code so she can help with the implementation.

If you end up using Doug Steele's code, I made a change that I think is important. That is where he was checking the .Connection property for a string without a length of 0, I changed it to check .Connection for a string with the left 4 characters set to "ODBC". I think that will result in a lot fewer unhappy users, especially in a well established and mature (power users) user base.