LiveCode Forums

Any current instructions/lessons/examples around of reading an MS Access MDB from Livecode?
Oh I should add, for Mac please.
Thanks in advance
Mark

Interesting question. Has Microsoft released any of the Access code as open source?

Hi,

use ODBC to connect to MS Access databases: Wiki. Reading from the .mdb itself can be done (via "read from file" ...), but the file structure is rather sophisticated. And if the Access coder is worth its salt, the data you're looking for aren't in it, anyways ;-)

Richard, don't think so. MS Access is a crucial part of MS' "enterprise ecosystem" (as front end to MS SQL), and this is where the money is made. It's even not included in the basic MS Office versions, you have to buy it separately.

Have fun!

Axwald, thanks for the quick reply and useful information. Much appreciated

Mark

AxWald wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 19, 2017 8:55 am

Hi,

use ODBC to connect to MS Access databases: Wiki. Reading from the .mdb itself can be done (via "read from file" ...), but the file structure is rather sophisticated. And if the Access coder is worth its salt, the data you're looking for aren't in it, anyways

Richard, don't think so. MS Access is a crucial part of MS' "enterprise ecosystem" (as front end to MS SQL), and this is where the money is made. It's even not included in the basic MS Office versions, you have to buy it separately.

Have fun!

Bump!

At the risk of proving that I am not worth my salt has anyone found any information on how to read data from Access files? I have some data only files that do not hold any BLOBs or other tricky stuff and it would be useful to crack them open. I may try and reverse engineer them during lockdown but probably not

As to the salt issue : there was the compelling reasons of cost why my database is written entirely in MSAccess and trust me I wanted to write the application using Livecode.

best wishes

Simon

Simon,

you could connect to your .mdb file from Livecode using ODBC. For Mac OS Actualtech is offering an ODBC driver for Access.
Currently only select and join is supported. Insert and update are not supported. Password protected databases are also not yet supported.
There is a full functioning driver available for download with one exception: It only returns 3 rows.

https://actualtech.com/product_access.php

Regards,
Matthias

Simon-

It's been a long time, but I have in the past connected to MSAccess databases in the past, so I can confirm that it can be done. I'll dig around in the archives and see if I still have any of the old code.

Hi,

Thanks to both of you, I'll investigate both suggestions.

Simon