Access Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Data Access Pages

When data access pages (DAPs) were introduced in Access 2000, they drew a lot of attention from Access developers who were looking for easy ways to move their data to the Web. DAPs promised to provide an Access-based designer that would allow developers to create web pages based on data, just as forms and reports were. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of the DAP design tools, the often-crippled functionality of the resulting pages (such as the inability to update data), and the requirement that users of the pages must have Office 2000 licenses, DAPs were not widely used.

In Access 2002, DAPs were greatly enhanced. The designer is now on par with Access’s form and report designers. Data on pages can be updated under most circumstances, and users without Office XP licenses can legally work with DAPs in the browser, albeit with a limited feature set. However, you’ll still need to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and later to view and work with DAPs, and users will still need to have the Office Web Components installed locally.

Perhaps the biggest limitation to DAPs is the way they connect to data. DAPs use ADO recordsets behind the scenes to retrieve and update data. These ADO recordsets are opened on your users’ machines, which means that your users must have direct access to the data. The only workaround—using recordsets that are opened on a web server—requires that you set up a complicated technology called Remote Data Services (RDS), ...