A2K to 2003 conversion & PDW

[Paul Burdett]

Hi Guys

I had an A2K application that I have successfully deployed on lots of
machines using the PDW. If the target machine already had Access, no
problem.
If it didn't, it installed runtime and all was well.

I then coverted the application to Access 2003. Again all was well until I
packaged the new version using PDW and installed it on machines with A2K
already resident. The application installs OK but when I try to open it
complains that the database format is unrecognisable.

Reading though newsgroups there seems to be a whole bunch of compatibility
issues between an Access 2003 application and earlier versions of Windows
and Access.

Unless I can find a way round this then it seems to me that I have to take
the application back to A2K.

So my questions are -
Is this what I have to do and is there a utility that can help me do it. I
notice that if I convert the Access 2003 database to 2000 format it won't
then let me create an MDE without converting back to 2003.
Can I force PDW to install and use Runtime?
Or is there another approach?

Thanks in advance.

Paul

 

[Norman Yuan]

Not like *.mdb, in which you can use latest Access (2003) to develop your
app and use an earlier version format (2000), *.mde can only be saved as the
version of the Access you are using.

So, if you have to deploy *.mde file, you would change the installation
logic in yout PDW. If I understand you correctly, what you did is that if
the user computer has Access (regardless its version), the Access runtime
would not be installed. Now you have to detect what version of Access is
installed on the user computer. If this is earlier version that is
incompatible to the *.mde format, then you have to install the runtime.
Since you can install multiple version of Access on sigle computer, I'd
think you can do it with Access runtime, too. But do not quote me n this, if
you run into a problem, because it does make things complicated and I did
hear some problems regardless what the causes could be.