Chapter 12. Tackling an Integration Project

This chapter describes a project that you should be able to tackle using the information presented in this book. If you have ever read project descriptions on the web sites that allow independent developers to bid on projects, you are probably aware that often they do not go into great detail as to what is required. For this project, I try to explain all of the needed functionality without specifying precisely how to complete the project. Following the project description , I will describe a potential solution to each piece of functionality. As with most programming items, there are many solutions to each.

In addition to performing integration tasks in the project, it will be necessary to build a graphical user interface (GUI). The project specifies that Access is the preferred tool for the GUI, but you can probably accomplish it using user forms in Excel. For a real-world example, consider creating a Windows application with Visual Basic that uses an Access database to store the data and automates Excel. This type of setup is sometimes required when not all of the users have Microsoft Access installed on their computers. The completed project is available on the O'Reilly web site implemented with Microsoft Access as the GUI. If you are not interested in working on the project from scratch, you can download the project and see how the features were implemented. As a reminder, if you want to open a database and skip the startup options, hold down the shift key while opening the database.