Best practice to save just one piece of information that might rarely change.
My application will generate PDF's. Those PDF's will almost certainly be always saved the same chosen folder. But a different user may want to choose another folder.
So, what is the best way to save the file path (string)?
1) I could store the path string to a constant. This is OK for me, but not for a non-programmer.
2) I could create a table with one record and one field. If I wrote code around that, then the other users could change & store the information.
3) I could create XML file. But now, I would have to do some coding to handle a situation where the XML file was not there (for various reasons).
Is there a better solution?
ASKER
Thank you for your quick reply.
Your assistance has been appreciated.
Another solution not mentioned is to use a different DB engine just for storing the PDFs as Blobs ...probably Firebird.
So no more chasing folders.
In the proposed solution i would modify it like this
Table :
ID User(PK) Application (PK) File (PK) Location SaveActionDate
AutoNmbr Number Number Number Text Date
So for every save action you log which user from which application saved the particular PDF to which location and when.
I assume that your PDFs have some kind of uniqueness so the exact filename would be saved them to a separate table. (ID, FileName)
Microsoft Access is a rapid application development (RAD) relational database tool. Access can be used for both desktop and web-based applications, and uses VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) as its coding language.
TRUSTED BY
This works for me. The conn string is rarely changed once the app is deployed but allows me, or a user, to change it if necessary.