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Asked: 2026-05-10T19:32:41+00:00

I have built a MS Access 2007 application that can create reports files in

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I have built a MS Access 2007 application that can create reports files in various formats (PDF, XLS, CSV, XML).
I would like to allow the creation of these reports to be accessible from a web page where users would just click on a link and get a download of the report produced by my Access application.

I would like to keep it simple and I’m not interested at this stage in rewriting the data processing in .Net. I’d just like to find a way to automate the creation of the user report to return a file that can be downloaded.
In essence, my Access application would act as a web service of some kind.

The web server is IIS on Windows 2003.

Any pointers or ideas would be welcome. I’m not well versed in IIS administration or ASP pages.

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  1. The first quick and dirty method i could think of would be to call Access from a shell and pass it a few parameters to open as read only and run a macro.

    That macro would have to pull it’s report parameters from somewhere (possibly env variables), run the report and save it as Excel, PDF or whatever to a unique name. To du this you’ll need to pass the report name, a unique request id, and a param array to handle multiple (or none) parameters.

    Last but not least your Access macro / VBA Sub will need to shut access down.

    This isnt a good solution as starting one copy of Access per request isn’t really advisable though.

    Another option is to have start Access on the server with a VBA sub that starts on opening. This sub could poll a directory for requests that are written by your web server. Then on receiving a request run a report and write it to somewhere. Again you’d have to base this around a unique request ID.

    I’m not really sure which ‘solution’ would be better…. Access as a command line report generator or Access as a batch reporting service. Both would be nasty, but would get you over the hump until you can migrate to a reporting service.

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