MS Access/Front Page (by Andrew Deacon, Multimedia Education Group, University of Cape Town)

UCT's Multimedia Education Group has grappled with the issue of taking databases online with the software they have available (MS Access, MS FrontPage, MS IIS web server), and ran a series of internal workshops on taking databases online using these programmes. Andrew Deacon outlines some of the issues and possible techniques.

• General web database issues
• Examples of techniques

Data changes infrequently: If the data does not change much then it is generally relatively straightforward to generate an HTML version of the database using the recent versions of databases applications. This HTML files would then need to be uploaded to the web server whenever the information changes.

Data changes frequently: If the database is updated frequently, the above approach may be too time consuming, especially if there are a number of pages that must be updated. In this case one needs to investigate the approaches that allow 'live' databases to be hosted on the web server. Examples are ASP on the Microsoft IIS web server (there are others, e.g., CGI, Perl scripts, and others). In this case you design the web pages to read the database once and then only change the database when needed. The database would need to be copied to the web server and be placed on a network where everyone has access.

Web site management: Databases are useful in web site management where there is a need to maintain information that is highly structured. Examples include a list of people and projects. Using a database to enter information about people and projects is often easier than maintaining a large number of different web pages. This is especially true when all web pages should look the same. This type of approach can, as described earlier, be either static of dynamic. In the static case this would involve generating a large number of web pages from a database in the same format. In the dynamic case one would need to use say ASP to read the database to generate the web pages dynamically.

Collaborative development of research resources: Databases are most useful in the way they force people to structure information. Keeping the database on the web allows one to maintain a single central database. This is a simple way to manage information as it is entered into the database directly. Everyone wanting to enter data must have access and generally a password system would need to be used to block outsiders. This is a little more difficult to implement than the approaches to display information. Some database applications support ways that make this relatively easy. For example, MS Access allows database forms to be created directly from existing forms.

Data collection: Databases are by far the best application for managing and collating large data sets. Making data available on the web encourages other researchers to make use of this data and then later contribute new and update the data. Where the data collection involves complex issues, this is better done manually, while the collection of say simple survey data could be done online using the approach outlined above.

Examples of techniques

It is often difficult to know what one can implement and what questions to ask and is even more difficult to answer these questions. 

We at the Multimedia Education Group at UCT had a similar problem and held a series of internal workshops on the topic. The web pages we compiled that describe the things we did are at: http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/asp/. This is an example of what we did with the software we had available (MS Access, MS FrontPage, MS IIS web server). This might server as a useful overview of the problems and solutions we had. It needs to be remembered that they were developed for our use and thus there are many things not covered and there may be a few problems with the examples. It does though cover the main issues outlined above.

• Requirements (applies to our environment): http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/asp/requirem.htm
• Using MS Access (simple example): http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/asp/ms_access_wizards.htm
• Using MS Front Page (simple example): http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/asp/FPintro.htm

One of the things we wanted to do in a more flexible way than was supported by MS FrontPage was to be able to generate hyperlinks. Our approach was http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/asp/hyperlin.htm.

• Static database that generates a small web site http://www.megweb.uct.ac.za/starting/intro.htm (a brief description of the approach: http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/downloads/Web/webgen.htm)
• Dynamic database using ASP was used in various parts of a Commerce course: http://www.megweb.uct.ac.za/eco110h/Scenario/
  historical.htm
• Updateable databases were used in a share trading game in the above course, but you will not be able to access this without a login.