Access form to ASP.NET

[Rick Brown]

I have a form built in Access2000 that looks like the hardcopy in all
ways including color. I now want to move this form to the company
Intra-Net via ASP.NET.
Is there a way to wizard this form over to .NET or can this form be
rebuilt in a .NET editor retaining the same look? OR?????

RICK

[Peter]

Rick Brown wrote:

I have a form built in Access2000 that looks like the hardcopy in all
ways including color. I now want to move this form to the company
Intra-Net via ASP.NET.
Is there a way to wizard this form over to .NET or can this form be
rebuilt in a .NET editor retaining the same look? OR?????

RICK

Rick,

It's hard to say without knowing more about the form, but generally speaking
you can recreate the look of a form pretty easily in html. The problem comes
in the way the form actually behaves. Some of the functionality you take for
granted in Access is unavailable, or much harder to implement, in a web
form.

One simple example: if you have data that changes after selecting a value
from a combo box, you have to either make a round trip to the server (which
could be fast or slow depending on the complexity of the page) to get the
updated data, or somehow download and cache all of the relevant data when
the page loads and then use javascript to change the contents of your other
controls. The stateless nature of web connections forces you to rethink a
lot of the ways you may have learned to do things.

In the end, you can certainly reproduce the business functionality of your
form, but the interface (not the look, necessarily, but the behavior) will
probably change. It's more a question of whether the easier access and
deployment in a web application is worth the extra work you have to do as a
developer. FWIW, in my experience once you get over the learning curve, it's
not hard to build good forms in .NET.

I'm not aware of any wizard that will do the job for you.

HTH.

--

Peter

[Peter Chong]

Hi, Rick
There is some change on your archtect,
move your access database to web server and generate asp.net(VB) form code
wizard from www.exmlsoft.com
It generates a code that base on your Access Table.

rb*******@compuserve.com (Rick Brown) wrote in message news:<82**************************@posting.google. com>...

I have a form built in Access2000 that looks like the hardcopy in all
ways including color. I now want to move this form to the company
Intra-Net via ASP.NET.
Is there a way to wizard this form over to .NET or can this form be
rebuilt in a .NET editor retaining the same look? OR?????

RICK

[Rick Brown]

Thanks for the reply,
The form I'm trying to place on the intra-net is for requesting
maintenance and is strickly for input into the database. It will
return no data from the server only accept data. The form does have a
few listboxes that will have hardcoded lists of choices.
I have tried using ASP.NET Web Matrix as my editor to build the form
but found that after dropping a textbox on the form I couldn't drag or
move the textbox to a new position.
I'm new at building an aspx page and was hoping building a form would
be more like working in Access2000 form design.
Is there another editor out there that is user friendly and will give
me more precision in the placement of controls.
Thanks again for taking the time,
RICK

"Peter" <pe******@nospam.net> wrote in message news:<bl************@ID-88800.news.uni-berlin.de>...

Rick Brown wrote:

I have a form built in Access2000 that looks like the hardcopy in all
ways including color. I now want to move this form to the company
Intra-Net via ASP.NET.
Is there a way to wizard this form over to .NET or can this form be
rebuilt in a .NET editor retaining the same look? OR?????

RICK

Rick,

It's hard to say without knowing more about the form, but generally speaking
you can recreate the look of a form pretty easily in html. The problem comes
in the way the form actually behaves. Some of the functionality you take for
granted in Access is unavailable, or much harder to implement, in a web
form.

One simple example: if you have data that changes after selecting a value
from a combo box, you have to either make a round trip to the server (which
could be fast or slow depending on the complexity of the page) to get the
updated data, or somehow download and cache all of the relevant data when
the page loads and then use javascript to change the contents of your other
controls. The stateless nature of web connections forces you to rethink a
lot of the ways you may have learned to do things.

In the end, you can certainly reproduce the business functionality of your
form, but the interface (not the look, necessarily, but the behavior) will
probably change. It's more a question of whether the easier access and
deployment in a web application is worth the extra work you have to do as a
developer. FWIW, in my experience once you get over the learning curve, it's
not hard to build good forms in .NET.

I'm not aware of any wizard that will do the job for you.

HTH.

[Peter]

Rick Brown wrote:

Thanks for the reply,
The form I'm trying to place on the intra-net is for requesting
maintenance and is strickly for input into the database. It will
return no data from the server only accept data. The form does have
few listboxes that will have hardcoded lists of choices.
I have tried using ASP.NET Web Matrix as my editor to build the form
but found that after dropping a textbox on the form I couldn't drag or
move the textbox to a new position.
I'm new at building an aspx page and was hoping building a form would
be more like working in Access2000 form design.
Is there another editor out there that is user friendly and will give
me more precision in the placement of controls.
Thanks again for taking the time,
RICK

<snip original question>

Rick,

I haven't used Web matrix, so I'm not sure how it does things. In Visual
Studio, each aspx page has a property called pageLayout. You can choose
GridLayout, which displays a grid on the design screen, and allows you to
place elements in specific positions on the screen, and uses CSS positioning
styles to maintain the desing, or FlowLayout, which just gives you a blank
aspx page.

Keeping it somewhat simple, using the latter layout, you won't be able to
move controls around on the form unless you have hltml or asp tables set up
to hold controls. I never use GridLayout, so even assuming this is available
in Web Matrix, I can't tell you much about it. When you open a new page,
does it have a grid of little dots, or do you see just whitespace?
Furthermore, from what I've read, people recommend against grid layout
anyway, saying that it seems to be difficult to get consistent layout on
different browsers.

Put another way, you'll probably have to learn some html coding to do what
you want to do. It's not going to be drag and drop like in Access.

--

Peter