networking actinic

[Tom55]

Hi,

I have a local area network in my shop with a server, laptop and shop pc...ive installed all 3 with actinic but want them all to use the same database (site folder on server) Any ideas?

[garyhay]

Not really as I dont think Actinic is available in a network version. In fact I am sure is is not.

You could use snapshots if you only want access for 1 client at a time or use virtual/remote desktop but if you want multiple users then afraid I cant help....sorry


the op...

[Tom55]

Thanks. Single user at any one time is fine. Just so it can be accessed/ modified in two locations. Surely I dont need a network version? Can you expalin what you mean "virtual / remote desktop"...i dont know much about networks!

Tom

[cdicken]

I think what Gary means is that you can get software that allows people to connect to your computer from another location on your network. We use PC Anywhere in the office here to operate each others PCs.

Another solution if you are using Actinic Business is to link your product catalogue to a networked Access database so any number of people can access the data at once.

If you just want to upload on one machine and download onto another, then that is standard functionality. Just install two copies of Actinic, using the same key for both, and then copy a snapshot across.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

[garyhay]

Chris

Do you know if we make linked tables can we have multiple accesses to the database in Catalog.


I wanted to try this out but had to finish a couple of projects before holidays on Sunday YEE HAA

I was speaking about VNC or remote desktop. You would need a pretty good network setup to run really smoothly.

This functionality is built into XP

[Jan]

Gary :
If you mean can you set up a database that links to the actinic tables and then change the tables in access or something else via the links then yes you can.

If you mean can I set up another access database, call it Catalog.mdb and link all of the tables in my real access database to it and then run actinic against it then you cannot because Actinic will not work with views or linked tables - I tried this for my product replication, I replaced the product table with a view called product and catalog would not open - complained about permisssions.

Tom :
I can see no reason why Actinic would not work if installed on a networked drive, you would have to install it on each of the machines specifying the networked area as the installation directory and keep all of the machines at the same version to pevent nasty things happening to the database. You would also have to make sure that only one person was using it at a time - Actinic caches a lot of data once started and so changes made by someone on one of the other machines would not be shown in the other copies. Actinic stores information in the database, in files in the site directory and in the window registry, the first two would be common to your three installations but the third one would not so say for example you changed your network setting you have to upload before you can download, you may find that you have to then do this on all three machines because the second two will not know that the first one has uploaded because the flag for this is held in the registry. I think that you would find lots of things like this and in practice may find it to much hassle to be worth the effort. I also think that you might well forget and run it on more than one machine at a time which will almost certainly cause problems.

As Chris says you can partition the product to order processing and catalog maintenance quite nicely using the standard features.

You could also use some of my products on the different machines to process orders in Actinic, they connect to Actinic through ODBC and so would have no problems connecting to the Actinic database on the networked drive - I am thinking in particular of my order processing modules, the automation moles would work but they would be tied to the same restraints as Actinic as they drive Actinic. You can find more information about my order processors here

Regards

[Tom55]

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the reply!

I would use the same version on all 3 machines and would make sure that nothing was edited at the same time. So that would be ok. I wouldnt want to change the network setup so that wouldnt be a problem.

How do I tell the other 2 machines that they should be using the networked version site1?

How do I 'partition' the two aspects of actinic as you described and what benefits/ problems would this solve?

Cheers,

Tom

[Tom55]

Oh and...

I want to now use asp pages on each machine to update stock levels/ new products just in etc... Can you see any problems with this? Ive been told asp pages are a doddle to implement/design using IIS installed on the server machine...Ive got a friend that will be doing this code for me...

[Jan]

To use Actinic on the networked version you would have to install it into that area on each machine. I don't know how you would stand with licensing if you are using it on more than one machine.

You can change the Actinic database from outside of Actinic - some information is cached, but I don't think that the product data is - you would have to try it to see (eg. have actinic open, change a price and run a page preview to see if it has changed).

Regards,