The recommended way to connect to your MS Access databases (*.mdb files) from your web pages is to use a DSN-less connection. Using a DSN-less connection allows you to setup your own database connections without requiring the server administrator to create a DSN for your database on the server. This document describes how to use DSN-less connections on the IIS/Windows 2000 server operated by the Department of Computing.

Note: If you want your web-pages to be able to update your database, you will need to set the access permissions for your .mdb file to allow this. To do this, connect to igor using SSH Secure Shell Client (or similar), change to the folder containing your .mdb file and use the 'chmod' command, like this:

chmod 666 mydb.mdb

replacing mydb.mdb with the name of your .mdb file.

To open a connection to an MS Access database from an ASP web page, you need to specify the driver and the path to your .mdb file in the connection string. For example, to connect to a database called my_db.mdb, you could use the following connection string:

"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" & server.MapPath("my_db.mdb")

There are other formats that can be used for DSN-less ASP connection strings which will work just as well as the one described above, but this format is the recommended one and it should work well for most purposes.

To query an MS Access database from a Coldfusion web page, you need to include an 'IN ...' clause in your SQL query which specifies the full path to your *.mdb file on the server. For example, to select the values from the name column of a table called people in an MS Access database called my_db.mdb in the home directory (G: drive) of user ma123az, you might use a Coldfusion CFQUERY tag such as this:

<cfquery name="query1" datasource="dynamic">
  SELECT name FROM people
  IN '\\moya\shared\ugrad\ma123az\my_db.mdb'
</cfquery>

A name could be inserted into the people table using a CFQUERY tag like the following, which gets the value for the name column from a form element called Form.name:

<cfquery name="query2" datasource="dynamic">
  INSERT INTO people (name)
  IN '\\moya\shared\ugrad\ma123az\my_db.mdb'
  VALUES ('#Form.name#')
</cfquery>

Note the use of the datasource name dynamic. Note also that the full path to the location of your *.mdb files on the server must be specified. All undergraduate students in the Department of Computing should refer to their home directories as sub-directories of \\moya\shared\ugrad, as described in the example above.