Chapter 25: Distributing Your Application

Overview

Although you can certainly use Microsoft Office Access 2007 to create database applications only for your personal use, most serious users of Office Access 2007 eventually end up building applications to be used by others. If you have created a stand-alone desktop database application and your users all have the same version of Access installed on their computers, you can simply give them a copy of your database file to run. However, most database applications become really useful when multiple users share the data.

In Chapter 6, “Importing and Linking Data,” you learned about linking tables from another database and using the Linked Table Manager. In Part 7, “Designing an Access Project,” on the companion CD, you’ll learn about some of the advantages of using a client/server architecture to allow multiple users running the same application to share data. Both these topics help you understand how to design and secure a multi-user application. However, they don’t provide you with the techniques you can employ in your application design to ensure that your application installs and runs smoothly and to ensure that your users can’t tamper with your code. In this chapter, you’ll learn

• How to split a desktop database to use shared data on a server and linked tables on each client computer and how to create code that verifies and corrects linked table connection properties when your application starts

• The advantages of runtime mode and design considerations for using it

• How to create an execute-only version of your application so that users can’t tamper with your code

• Techniques for creating application shortcuts to simplify starting your application

• How to apply an encrypted database password to your database

• How to package your database and digitally sign it

• Tools you can use in Access 2007 Developer Extensions and Runtime to distribute your application to users who don’t have Access