It's not a matter of "hacking" into tables, which makes the issue of add-ins somewhat shady. Remember, the information in your tables are those of your patients and are thus legally yours. I'm surprised that this issue wasn't covered recently in the AC convention, which Jon attended. You are correct that it is always best to get the original developers on-board, as they can not only give you their blessing, but they can help with certain technical aspects of any project. They even may need to add a section specifically focused on downloads to the forum!

I don't think that you'll ever get an "SDK", though. SDK's usually are used to provide an interface between 2 disparate platforms. Case in point: when I used to program for the Palm environment using Satellite Forms (SF), the SF developers provided an SDK so as to allow for add-ins that were programmed in Visual Basic (SF is programmed in a low-level "C" language). The add-in development became so robust that when SF was sold off, it was purchased by the largest add-in developer, Mr. Thacher. SDKs will be big business if and when the HL7 becomes the defacto standard, since it's both complicated and at times somewhat proprietary. The interoperability promised by our despised CCHIT could easily be made by offering a free government financed SDK interface without all the other "standards" stuff.

AC, written in MS Office, is based on a very popular platform. When an executable is made (i.e. an MDB is converted to an MDE shell), all the code is hidden and is essentially locked. The tables, however, are always available and easily retrievable, even when password protected. Password protection thus only serves to keep the casual user from damaging the underlying tables if they don't know what they are doing.

Anyhow, maybe Jon can give a "townhall" meeting on-line to discuss add-ins (the politically correct word, BTW) which would take his AC program to new heights.

Vicki- MS Access exports information in any number of file types-

-- MS Office/Access (s.a. *.mdb, *.adp)
-- MS Excel (versions 5-2003, *.xls)
-- HTML document
-- Text Files (*.txt, *.csv, *.tab, *.asc)
-- MS Active Server Pages (*.asp)
-- MS IIS 1-2 (*.htx, *.idc)
-- Rich Text File, *.RTF
-- for Access 2003 and 2007, *.XML
-- for Access 2007, *.PDF

It can also use the old, venerable ODBC for connection with enterprise backend databases, s.a. SQL, Oracle, etc... so you don't need to buy anything other program.

Last edited by alborg; 07/07/2008 4:09 AM.