From: Dave Burt <dave@...>
Date: 2005-09-16T06:56:34+09:00
Subject: Re: MS Access

Steve wrote:
> I'm considering learning Ruby. I have no programming experience yet. I
> was wondering if it's possibly to write applications in Ruby that can
> use
> and change the data in my MS Access files.

Phlip wrote:
> Absolutely. Database are designed to access a wide warehouse of data
> through
> a narrow interface. Narrow interfaces are easy to port to new languages.
> Ruby will see tables of data, just like Visual Basic or C++ will.

Sean Armstrong wrote:
> Does anyone have any good code examples? The hardest thing for people like
> Steve, and myself, is that the documentation for these items are very
> limited and not very revealing to newbies. For instance, I could not find 
> a
> single code example for connecting to a SQL database, let alone Access, in
> the Pickaxe book. So if anyone has any good code examples for manipulating
> data in Access or MySQL, I would like to see it here.

If you're not only concerned about the database, or even if you'd like to 
use ADO (or DAO) through Access to manage it, I think a better option, 
that's about as easy as writing VBA code (but with all the advantages of 
Ruby) is using WIN32OLE and Access' COM automation. See 
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ScriptingExcel (I thought there was a 
ScriptingAccess, but I can't see it...) It's mostly pretty obvious how to 
write Ruby code from the VB docs included with Access.

Cheers,
Dave