PHP and Access

paulsheffII · 9 Jun 2007 at 20:42

I'm building a site at the moment and this guy wants a live update of how busy the place the site is for actually is.

He's building something in access to handle customers. He'll obviously be on a windows machine, the site will be running on Linux.

So I either need to get his machine accessible from the web to get the php to connect to it and grab a number, or I was wondering if anyone knew if access could call an address say http://www.site_name.com/peeps_on_board.php?people=$value periodically?

I've not worked with Access much tbh.

Thanks

paulsheffII · 10 Jun 2007 at 00:47

Sorry guys I've not made myself clear.

The staff will be using a local machine based interface for inputting customer data onto the access database during operations hours. For health and safety they'll need to know who is in the building at any one time. So this file on the PC in the building will know the exact number of people using the facilities at that one time. He wants to make that data available to the website live so people can see whether it's too busy to attend or not. What I need to do is

a) make it so that a web page can access that file sat on that machine so it can pull a live figure from file without it having to be added manually separately.
b) A macro thingy kind of a reverse of what psyr33n suggested that basically every five minutes goes:

Number_of_people_in_building = x;
getURL("http://www.website.com/how_busy.php?number=Number_of_people_in_building")

type thing to pass that parameter to the webpage so it can be saved to a MySQL. Not even sure that's possible with Access.

I could have course try and get him to scrap the local Access file and make him use an online CMS style to track people in and out of the building through a web interface with php and MySQL meaning the local and online service use the same DB. Course if the net connection goes down then it’s a problem so while it's still in the infancy of thinking I was trying to feel out any possibilities.

paulsheffII · 10 Jun 2007 at 00:54

I wonder if there's something we could run under windows that grabs the figure from the Access file then passes it to the webpage if Access can't do that?

paulsheffII · 10 Jun 2007 at 03:48

psyr33n said:
So you're essentially asking how to grab data from an Access database (stored on a local machine) using PHP (stored on a webserver)?

Are the computers networked?

Yep that's what I'm going for. There will be a broadband connection available to the machine with the Access DB on it yes.

paulsheffII · 10 Jun 2007 at 14:23

Guys please, every suggestion is welcomed so thanks everyone for your input.

I think your suggestion Mickey is probably the best route, a go between that can read the access file and call a web page. I thought about just writing a classic ASP page that uses the Access file as a DB, meta refreshes every 5 minutes pulling the DB data and passing it to the site. I could always get that to load in IE on startup.

If anyone could point me in the direction of a cleaner way of doing that I'd be most grateful.