How hard can this be? Going slightly mad here Access to Mysql

[trevormichaelfisher]

Hi you all seem like a knowledgeable and relatively sane group.
Here's my problem and forgive me if I am not fluent in the database world language, I am a humble designer.
I have a client who operates a medium size hotel and he uses an internal inventory system to log bookings and allocate and track rooms. It's nothing amazing but he loves it, wont change it and all his staff are used to it and this counts for a lot where we are. It's data is based on MS Access and is locally hosted on their office server.

He wants to offer instant booking from the new website I am designing. This will be in Wordpress on a Windows server. To design a booking form the only things I need to query are three fields:

Room Type - Check in date - check out date, thuse generating a true or false value depending on whether that room type is available on the sates requested, or are all the rooms of that type already booked.

We don't want to rely on humans to make sure that two databases are in sync though.
So I can't design an online system and run it in parallel, it will get out of sync and ruin someones holiday one day, experience tells me this is so.



However it seems to me that it is a fairly straightforward thing for experts to do the following:

Have the relevant fields in the MS Access database update the relevant fields in an online database, say every half hour, specifically for Room Type, Check In Date and Check Out Date.
This will allow me to design a booking form. After that they are back in my world and I can handle everything online up to payment and generate an email to the client and to the reservation team who then manually update the in-house MS Access based software which in turn updates the online database etc.

I have put this job out to several freelancer websites and have received replies so far that do not bear much scrutiny.

I am hoping one of you kinds can put me out of my misery, this doesn't seem like rocket science. Willing to employ someone to implement it for me too so don't be shy.

Thanks in anticipation of a gentle response.

[ItsMe]

I am not an expert in it but I will guess the best solution is to host the MySQL server local to the Access DB where the users are. If this is not possible, a reliable VPN should be employed.

With that, host your tables on MySQL and connect to them using an ODBC connection.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/

[trevormichaelfisher]

Thanks a million, looking into that right now.

[ItsMe]

Sure thing, post back with more questions. I may not be able to answer them but others may. I will add that this project, as an aggregate, may be outside the typical scope of a developer. For instance, newer technologies/services for remote access to servers exist and your client may wish to involve their IT department to determine the most feasible approach.

[orange]

Cross posted on UA

http://www.utteraccess.com/forum/Ms-...-t2020283.html

[trevormichaelfisher]

Hi guys and thanks for your generous advice, I will take time to digest. I did also post this on another forum, I don't think that is a cross post as I had no way to know that the two apparently independent forums were related, apologies if this others anyone, I am just trying to get this solved.

[orange]

Yes it is a cross post.
Just tell readers that you have posted and show the link.
see this for more info