Creating a "holding bucket" to save form submissions prior to approval to migrate (1 Viewer)

Creating a "holding bucket" to save form submissions prior to approval to migrate

You may have seen some of my previous posts relating to a Delay submission reporting system.

I am nearing the end of this project after a lot of useful help from you guys and am coming to the stage where I need to integrate what seem like really complex features in my mind.

I currently have this database which has 8500+ records (each one being one delay) which spans years and years of data and I am wanting to keep this protected from everyone else bar myself and my department. On a weekly basis we are wanting to add to this by using delay information which engineers on other computers will be wanting to submit.

What I would like to create, is a nice form that is easy for them to use, they would put in all the information, press submit and then that form would be sent to my Access database and put into a pending/awaiting approval basket/state.

Is this doable using Access ideally or some other software to create an application to submit forms via email in a client directly into Access? I am trying to avoid having to use Google Forms as I don't want to rely on a form entry system which might change, as I know Google has made a lot of changes in the past which has messed up certain users' systems and they have had to rework things.

Re: Creating a "holding bucket" to save form submissions prior to approval to migrate

You could use a separate distributed runtime Access front end to collect the data and email it to you as an excel attachment, they are simple to import / view in a form for verification before submission.

Re: Creating a "holding bucket" to save form submissions prior to approval to migrate

Hmm... that sounds like quite a good method. Would it be possible to keep these report submissions inside of the Access Database backend as well as having them emailed in some sort of format either Excel, Word or PDF?

Are there any easy to follow examples for making forms export and email via Outlook? From what I've briefly read on the internet, it seems as though they took this feature out of Access 2016 am I right? Is there a workaround?

Dealing with the issue of the distributed runtime Access front end. That will just require the Access runtime environment right? And that is a free to download and use thing from Microsoft right?

When a form (filled in by the engineer using the Access runtime environment) is submitted, can I simultaneously have it send to a list of email addresses as a PDF with some nice formatting / appearing as it does on the form as well as being saved as a record in a pending table in the back end?

Re: Creating a "holding bucket" to save form submissions prior to approval to migrate

All of the above are possible, and if tackled bit by bit not too difficult to achieve.

Don't export the form, export the data in excel. By all means print out / email them or get them to complete a pretty form, but that's not easy to re-import.
If you import the submissions into a staging table within your back end, then you will have a record. The staging table records would be where you would then "approve" them for upload / manipulation into your main data.

Runtime yes is free, you will need to ensure all your code is error checked and error handled as any un-handled error generated on runtime will bomb you out of the database.

I would keep a local copy of the data on the remote machine, maybe add a userID and machine name with a datestamp to the records, this will mean you could "sync" those records with a master table in your back end if or when they are able to connect to your local main network.