At J Street Technology, we use our skills to build systems for ourselves! We also love to watch movies and discuss them
- we even review them at some company meetings. So of course we had to build our very own application to track our movie reviews. Over
the years our Movie Reviews application has migrated from Access to SQL Server, ASP, and ASP.NET. Now it's using Access 2010 web services
with a SharePoint back-end database, running on Office 365. This allows the entire application to run right in any web browser, including IE,
Chrome and Firefox. Unlike traditional Access applications, no desktop installation is needed!
The Movie detail screen is a traditional form and subform architecture. But because the application is running on the web,
there are some limitations. Aggregate values (like averages and sums) can't be calculated using traditional totals queries. Instead, we calculate
them into stored fields using Data Macros, which are defined at the table level and are web safe.
Access 2010 includes an intrinsic web browser control that is fully programmable. This makes it easy to display related web
content right in the application. In this case, we've created a tab on the Movie screen that displays the selected movie's IMDB page.
It's easy to maintain the people in the database (these names have been randomized). Again, we use data macros to calculate
average scores and review counts. We also use a technique to sort inactive people to the bottom of the list, not only here but also in dropdown lists.
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