Integrate glide apps to offline ms access db for time-attendance devices

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1

Hello Gliders!

My name is Bernard, am new to Glide Apps and i’m already a fan thanks to the community of sharing and kb.

I got an opportunity to develop a mobile leave application.

The prospect is looking at the following business case.

  1. Employees are able to use the app to apply for leave, annual leave, sick leave and etc.
  2. The app will send for approval from their managers and cc to HR.
  3. Once approved, the record will also update the time attendance solution which is now on premise and running on MS Access.

Question

  1. I’ve looked at a number of possible suggestions and possibilities of using scripts to create batch file and ftp to the ms access folder and odbc to import the csv.
  2. Is there anyone working on this solution… where i can also perhaps test is.
    a) Record updated upon approval, leave approved >> update MS Access.

Looking fwd to a response.

Have a great day Gliders!

2

I’m not familiar with MS Access. Does it have an API? Sounds like your solution below is much more complicated than an API call.

3

Hi thanks for your reply… yes… been cracking my head…

If you know anyone thats famjliar with MS access… and API wirh Glide… this will be an interesting project.

4

Maybe @Darren_Murphy can have some insights. If it can be an API solution, then I think it’s straightforward. Basically you send a payload from Glide, and use a HTTP call to push that to MS Access.

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5

Hola!

You can create a macro in MS Access and run it hourly or daily along with a query to retrieve your latest data, then the same macro would send that data to a Google Sheet with no problem.

Also, you can have an Excel file, import the MS Access via ODBC into Excel and run a macro to send your data to a Google Sheet (manually or by a schedule).

For these 2 cases, the WinHttpRequest object (VBA) is the key to send data to an external server.

The 3rd option may be to use a JDBC driver, but things will get messy if you don’t handle the programming well.

I’ve done this sort of thing before, not with MS Access specifically, but I know what to do at least if the data is saved to Excel or needs to be retrieved via ODBC/OLEDB.

Saludos @Bernard_Chia

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6

haha, the last time I touched MS Access would have been at least about 30 years ago. I think the best advice I could give would be to get rid of that and get a proper database :rofl:

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7

I thought so at first . but my prospect client distributes time attendance machines to manufacturers… and their device runs on MS access db… on prem.

If theres a way for their device to point to an online db… this would be great… but that would be their device manufacturer to solve… i guess.

Any suggestions?

They also integrate their offline db to their offline payroll system.

i did propose them to consider using mobile apps to capture time attendance… but their challenge is not all workers have access to smart mobile phone.

8

Nothing specific, sorry. Windows based Apps are not my thing. But there is usually a way, sometimes you just need to get a bit creative. Looks like @gvalero has given you a few clues.

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9

Thanks… yup… gonna experiment with his suggestions too… thanks for the reply and insights.