Question about "updating" an .MDE remotely

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Guest

I have a question that I'm hoping some of you will have had some experience
with so will hopefully be willing to share some insight with me.
I have an application .MDE that is on a remote machine (out of state). This
app has been running over a year with no problems. Now, I have made some
necessary changes to a form and want to replace the old form with the new
form in the remote .MDE. (Traveling to each remote location is not an
option.)
Have you guys ever done this type of thing by creating some type of "service
patch" that a user can run and have it update changes like this? Is this
possible? How do you handle updating existing REMOTE apps with the
inevitable changes that occur over time???
All input is greatly appreciated!
 
Joey said:
I have a question that I'm hoping some of you will have had some experience
with so will hopefully be willing to share some insight with me.
I have an application .MDE that is on a remote machine (out of state). This
app has been running over a year with no problems. Now, I have made some
necessary changes to a form and want to replace the old form with the new
form in the remote .MDE. (Traveling to each remote location is not an
option.)
Have you guys ever done this type of thing by creating some type of "service
patch" that a user can run and have it update changes like this? Is this
possible? How do you handle updating existing REMOTE apps with the
inevitable changes that occur over time???
All input is greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...

You can't do this with an MDE although it would be possible in an MDB.

The "best practice" is to always split your app into a front end file and a
back end file (tables only). Then front end updates (the most common) are
a simple matter of replacing the entire file. Data is not affected because
it's in another file.

Of course sometime the updates involve changes to tables as well but since
the back end is tables only you can still make modify it. For small
changes I would typically have run-once code in a new front end that would
programmatically implement the changes to the back end file when it's used
for the first time. For extensive back end changes it might be simpler to
replace it with a new one and then have an automated routine to pull in all
of the data from the old data file.
 
All you need to do here is send them a new mde file.

Of course, you now just learned about splitting here. So, what you do is
create a new mde file, and link it to the OLD mde file.

From now on, then you can just email them a new mde file with all your code,
form, and report changes. The ONLY part that gets difficult is if you have
to change the structure of the data tables.

So, just make a new mde,but make that mde linked to the "old" mde that they
currently have for the data..

You can read about splitting here:

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