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I believe I had the same problem and eventually just gave up (before I knew about the lounge!) and used all asp to handle the collection and confirmation pages.

I will be interested in the solution if one is found as I often build sites I turn over to the customer to maintain and if FrontPage can really do this right it would be easier for them.

hrboyce

Without having Word installed on the web server to call using it as some sort of an object server (?!?!?!) I doubt you will able to accomplish your goal.

If you are willing to get that far into the weeds then may I suggest a book titled Instant ASP Components by Osborne/McGraw-Hill. It has a chapter that describes how to call MS-Wword in ASP and insert elements from an HTML form into the document, save it, and send it to the user. It probably could be modified to suit your purpose but I am really not quailfied to say for sure. I will say this, I believe Word2k isn’t really suited for this purpose since it would be single threaded thus limiting the number of concurrent web users who could create such a document. Also loading and unloading the word ‘engine’ on the server could be cumbersome as well.

I also don’t think a search and replace on the web server for an embeded saved directory in the word file will work either. I believe there is a checksum placed on the document when it is saved which would probably make word think the document has been corrupted when it was loaded by the user, but now I am really guessing on what might happen. You might want to try the word forum for some help on this, they may be able to help more.

hr

Rob…
There is always a local user. Usually on a server it is the admin who is logged in on the server at the time. This user probably isn’t going to be listed in a user table so it may only appear to be broke..

Users accessing the MDB file via a share or UNC on the file server are still going to have their own Login ID when they access the MDB file over the network. In that case the posted code will work.

If the users are accessing the file from a web server then all the user rules change depending on how the web server is set up. If that is the case I will try to explain the best I can in a subsequent post.

One more thought, it may be that your users don’t have enough permissions on the file server. They need to have read, write, and delete because each time they access the MDB file using MS-Access an LDB file gets created. When they close MS-Access if no other users are using the MDB file then the LDB file will get deleted. If they can’t delete things can get strange.

Maybe one of the MVPs can explain what happens better.

I posted in the VB/VBA form and got this answer from Andrew Cronnolly, it seems to work in 98 haven’t tried in any NT versions yet, hope it helps.

Public Declare Function GetUserName Lib “advapi32.dll” _
Alias “GetUserNameA” (ByVal lpBuffer As String, nSize As Long) As Long

Function GetUser() As String
Dim lpBuff As String * 255
Dim ret As Long, UserName As String
ret = GetUserName(lpBuff, 255)
GetUser = Left(lpBuff, InStr(lpBuff, Chr(0)) – 1)
End Function

While the toolbar won’t be there you should always be able to get a file save as menu when word opens in the browser. I believe that users who have loaded the recent security patches for outlook and outlook express that have come down lately will always get prompted to save the file (one of woody’s complaints I think).

You might also want to try saving the file as rtf. It will still load in word, also word pad (if the file is not to complicated) and a number of other word processors if the user doesn’t have Word.

Some users may trust it more as there can be no macro virus in an rtf

Using the information in jscher2000 post with GenericDB you need to change the line in YOUR asp file that starts with:

Session(“dbconn”)= Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source=e:intranet_rootwwwroottestfpdbmydb.mdb”

In my source that is all on one line! GenericDB works great but has all the limitations of using Access on a web site because of the jet engine. I believe lines three and four in his connection string are only required if Access security is turned on in the database. Otherwise the default is used.

The key is the full path on the ISP’s server for the Data Source. If they won’t provide it for some reason the path can be retrieved using the server object I think. If turns out to be a problem post back and I will look it up.

You will also have to set the right permissions on the directory where the database resides so I would recommend that is be in its own directory. It will need read write and DELETE because a yourfilename.LDB file will get created and in certain circumstances that I haven’t nailed down yet, if this file isn’t deleted errors that say the file is locked by another user occur and the only way to cure it is to stop and start IIS, something ISPs really hate.

More than you wanted to know I am sure, hope it helps

I thought about that, its an easy solution, but win98 and win95 users won’t have an username environment variable.

For anybody reading this that has a pure NT environment environ(“USERNAME”) works but USERNAME must be caps.

Still Looking

As with most questions there is no one right answer but let me take a stab at helping.

First you need to know if the service (ISP) supports ACTIVE SERVER PAGES (ASP). If it is an NT/IIS server there is a good possibility. Some Unix boxed support ASP but not many. Support for FrontPage server extensions by itself is not a guarantee of support for ASP.

Once that is out of the way and you have verified that ASP is available the simplest way for someone to create a series of forms like you described would be to get a copy of GENERIC DB from http://www.learnasp.com/links/genericdb.asp
Your post doesn’t indicate if more than one table is involved so additional help is difficult. The ASP script contained in GenericDB is fully functional and can be a great learning tool, but not for a novice ASP programmer. I would suggest a Beginning ASP book published by WROX to help get you started if GenericDB doesn’t do the trick (sorry woody but I dont know of a book of yours that covers ASP ).

The connection string you mentioned is paramount to getting Access to provide data to any form or for that matter probably your results page so the connection may be defined and working in those pages somewhere.

Hope this helps