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    <p>I help maintain an MFC application that uses Access 2003/2007 for its reporting. It's a system we're trying to change - Access is not very flexible and our "hosting" of Access inside MFC is a bit haphazard.</p> <p>I wasn't a first party to the design of the hosting architecture and why things were implemented in certain ways, but here's a short outline of two difficulties we have with Access in our application:</p> <p><strong>Only a full Access installation registers the <code>Access.Application</code> OLE Automation interface</strong>. If you can guarantee that your users will have a full installation of Access then this won't apply to you (<code>CLSIDFromProgID</code> followed by a <code>CoCreateInstance</code> will get you an automation interface), but if you have to get an <code>Access.Application</code> object for the Access Runtime then there's some extra plumbing to be done. You need to start <code>msaccess.exe</code> and <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/238610" rel="nofollow">mess around with <code>GetActiveObject</code> and <code>Sleep</code> until you get find an instance of the interface</a>. There's <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/145707" rel="nofollow">KB145707</a> which shows the two ways to connect, albeit in VBA.</p> <p><strong>Access is not designed to be embedded in another application</strong>. There's no <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311546" rel="nofollow"><code>Excel.Sheet</code></a> equivalent for Access reports. You can see this in your CodeProject sample - it renders a report to an intermediate <code>.html</code> file and then uses an embedded web browser control to display the report.</p> <p>Our application does The Wrong Thing (TM) here and fiddles with the Access application's window style, parent and position and makes it look like there's a report inside our application but it's just a visual sleight of hand. While <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/31/10147981.aspx" rel="nofollow">there's nothing wrong with having parent/child windows from different processes</a>, in this case it leaves us with us some undesired behaviour.</p> <ol> <li><p>We use a custom Office Ribbon, and because Access 2007's ribbon is part of the window frame the user can drag Access "out" of our app. </p></li> <li><p>When a process terminates it gives up any "foreground focus" it had. When <code>msaccess.exe</code> closes because the user has closed a report our app ends up at the bottom of the window z-order (due to the way we've parented the Access window).</p></li> </ol> <p>I think you should look at actual reporting libraries, and compare them to the effort you'll need to go to integrate Access into your application.</p> <ul> <li><p><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=6442" rel="nofollow">Microsoft Report Viewer</a> is a lightweight yet powerful reporting library. It uses .NET, but you can use a proxy application to host the control. From above, it's valid to have parent/child windows from different processes. If you can get your application to C++/CLI, it's even easier with <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8z4d86s2.aspx" rel="nofollow"><code>CWinFormsControl</code></a>.</p></li> <li><p><a href="http://www.businessobjects.com/jump/xi/crvs2010/default.asp" rel="nofollow">SAP Crystal Reports</a> is also free, but it's not as lightweight as Report Viewer.</p></li> </ul> <p>If you absolutely have to use Access, I'd personally steer away from using the automation interfaces and use an <a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/about-startup-options-HP005188724.aspx" rel="nofollow"><code>AutoExec</code></a> macro with the <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/209207" rel="nofollow"><code>/cmd</code></a> switch to describe which report I want rendered and where to render it to. <code>AutoExec</code> would kick in, render the report and close Access (there's an example of the technique <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/207672" rel="nofollow">here</a>). Once the output file is created, you can take that and embed it in your application. A couple of suggestions:</p> <ol> <li><p>If your reports are simple then stick with the <code>.html</code> and web browser example from the CodeProject article.</p></li> <li><p>If your reports have complex formatting you could output the report as a <code>.snp</code> (Snapshot) file and then display it in your application (the <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175274" rel="nofollow">Access Snapshot Viewer</a> is embeddable - the PROGID is <code>snpvw.Snapshot Viewer Control.1</code>).</p></li> </ol>
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