[Zope] MS Access interfacing

[Thomas B. Passin]

[Bruce]
>
> Now I'm faced with searching a 20Mb Access database and displaying
> selected records from it.
>
> Downloading a new copy with every access at 20Mb is prohibitive, and
> it's not updated so often as to be important. I can manually stash it
> wherever necessary as needed.
>
> The first question is where to stash it. I want to avoid installing
> new software or services on the various machines, though I certainly
> could, within reason and limitiation. Ideally, I want to just stash
> it on the Linux server, and have Zope take care of the interface and
> display. But looking at the Jet ODBC connectors, it appears that they
> really want to live in Windows.
>

There's no problem getting data from an Access database via ODBC as long as
the ODBC driver and the database are on the **same Windows machine**.  I've
not been able to make this work when the server+odbc is on a different
machine from the database.

My inclination would be to put a Zope installation on the  Windows machine
that has the Access database (you could copy the database every once in a
while if it doesn't get updated too often.  That way you could avoid putting
anything on someone else's machine).  Build Zope pages that return the data
as lists, I would think, and get them into your Zope Linux installation that
way.

Of course, to actually get the data from Zope you have to write queries
against the database, but that's separate from getting this transfer
machinery going.

Another approach would be to get a python xml-rpc server running on the
Windows machine.  That would use mxodbc to get data from the database and
return it to Zope using xml-rpc.  This should be pretty easy to do.

Either way, you let Zope take the data and format it into your final html
pages.  With the first method, you ought to be able to have the Zope on the
Windows box do all the work, and the Linux box would just pas it along.

Cheers,

Tom P