Take Your Web Site to New Levels

Import a database file into FrontPage

The ability to integrate your database files with your website is one of the most powerful Features of Microsoft FrontPage. Finally, anyone with basic knowledge of FrontPage and databases can develop powerful web enabled database applications.

Before you get started, you'll need to make sure that your web host has FrontPage Server extensions installed

For this tutorial, we'll use the northwind.mdb file that is included with your purchase of Microsoft Access. Before we begin, though, we need to learn about this particular database.

Northwind is a fictitious trading company that sells a variety of food related products. These include beverages, condiments, confections, dairy products, grains/cereals, meat/poultry, produce, and seafood.

This food is marketed to a diverse group of companies around the world. We will use this database for much of our work, and later we will create some custom databases that we'll use for some of our other assignments.

To begin with, you'll need to import the database file to FrontPage. If you read a lot of the literature, it will tell you that you can have FrontPage create your database for you. I don't recommend this. First, it gives you little control over the original database creation. Second, designing the database yourself will give you the power to take FrontPage to a whole new level.

Here is how to do import a database from your computer into your website.

Click File-Import. You will see the following screen:

Click the Add File... button and navigate through your hard disk to find the northwind.mdb file. To make this process easier, search for the file first, and then copy it to your desktop. find the file, select it and then click on the Open button in the "Add File to Import List" screen.

You will then see the Northwind.mdb file added to the Import Screen. Click OK.

After a few minutes, while it imports the file, the following screen will appear. This is where you will tell FrontPage how to connect to the northwind database.

Type the name Northwind exactly as it appears in the following screen shot and click Yes.

FrontPage stores database files in a directory "fpdb". You will get this screen to recommend that you follow this standard practice. Select Yes. If you do not currently have a directory called fpdb, FrontPage will create it for you.

Once this has finished. You can navigate to the fpdb directory, and you will see the northwind.mdb file present. There is only one step left. In FrontPage, select Tools-Web Settings...

Click Tools-Web Settings...

This will bring up the following screen:

Click on the Database Tab.

The following screen will open with all of the various database connections that are currently present in your web. You'll see a question mark beside the Northwind database. Select this database connection and click the Verify button.

After a short pause, the question mark should change to a check mark. Your database connection is now ready to use. You can now use the northwind database connection in FrontPage.