A friend of mine has used data access pages to allow browsing and updating of information via an intranet site running on IIS for ages. Recently she asked me to look into an issue where it appeared that some of her users were unable to access the previously working pages and some new ones she’d just developed. Confusingly some of the users were working fine. So whats going on ?
Background to DAP
Dynamic content is at the heart of successful presentation of enterprise information on the Internet. Without the ability to present data with user interaction, Internet based commerce will be meaningless. It is possible to create dynamic web pages with data from the enterprise by using several technologies, including MS Access. Using MS Access, it is possible to create dynamic web pages using a couple of techniques. The technology of Active Server Pages; Data Access Pages [DAP] which had their debut in Access 2000; and a combination of IIS, ODBC and the Internet Database Connector can all be used for creating dynamic web pages using MS Access. However, each of these methods have their own ambit in which they are created. ASP, being a server side technology, leverages ADO, while Data Access Pages, a client side technology, depends on DynamicHTML. It is DHTML data binding with ADO that makes Data Access Pages possible. IDC is of historical value only, being version 1.0 of dynamic web page generation technique. Whether or not DAP also becomes of historical value compared to the flagship ASP (ASP.NET) remains to be seen.
Microsoft Access stores all information about the data in its MDB file. However, DAP information is stored in an HTM file with a .htm extension. Since DHTML is behind this technology, it goes without saying that Microsoft’s DOM (Document Object Model), the XML, the CSS and related technologies are brought into its creation.
Unfortunately with the arrival of Access 2007 this useful data delivery system is being dropped. For those of you however that have expended energy getting the feature to work may be dismayed to find that after your migration to IE7 that that variously you get messages about an IE addin OWC10 not working or your browser closes on opening a DAP page.
Issues with Office Web components OWC10 and 11 are at play here!! So the short answer to get the DAP pages working again is to remove the OWC with may be referred to as the XP version (2002) or Office Web Components 2003.
To resolve the problems mentioned above I found that removing the OWC from add remove components and rebooting machine before reinstalling the OWC version you were using.
Just a hint – download a copy of the OWC 10 or 11 before removing the one you have !!!
Solution
Remove owc10 and reinstall