Re: Replication question

Brett R. Selleck wrote:
>
> Bradley J. Gong (bradg_at_thincsolutns.com) wrote:
> : In Access 8.0, how "smart" is the replication feature? For example,
> : if you've got a relationship between two tables, say tblPeople and
> : tblBranchLocations, where tblPeople contains a foreign key,
> : BranchLocationID. If a remote user (using Replica1) adds a few people
> : into tblPeople, but at one point, has to add a person that works at a
> : brand new BranchLocation. The BranchLocation gets added to
> : tblBranchLocations, receiving a new BranchLocationID because it is an
> : AutoNumber field.
>
> Take a closer look at what happens to your auto number fields when you
> convert the databse to a design master. Any autonumber fields should be
> changed to a random "replication ID". This number varies from negative 2
> billion to positive 2 billion or so. By doing this access is limiting the
> number of chances for it to have duplicate records. The number that is
> added to the table that rebecca spoke of is a GUID this is a unique
> identifier for each row of each table in each seperate replica, but it
> serves a different purpose... more of a system purpose.
>
> So all in all the replication is pretty smart, easy to work with? No!
>
> I suggest that you get a copy of the office developers tools and use the
> replication manager. This makes it a whole lot easier.
>
> Brett Selleck
> Application Developer
> Meijer Inc.
> selleckb_at_csis.gvsu.edu

Have to beg to differ with you here. I find Replication Manager an enormous pain to work with, and I'd avoid it unless you need one of its features, like scheduling synchronization. The graphics don't update properly to keep track of the replica sets, and since the whole point of it is to be a graphical interface, if the graphics are off, it's just not fun at all. It is far simpler IMO to just use the replication menu commands or code to manage the process.

And using, or not using, replication manager has no impact on how Access handles autonumber fields.

Keri Hardwick Received on Wed Jul 08 1998 - 00:00:00 CEST