Integrating I.E., MS Word and a database

[Bradley]

Our company stores resumes in an online database. We are currently using a JavaScript HTML editor to edit/modify submitted resumes to our company. The resumes' are stored as HTML in an unparsed field in a DB2 database. The problem with this is the fact that the HTML is VERY poor.

With this said, we are looking to get rid of our custom HTML editor and instead use MS Word to edit and save resumes to the database (Netscape is not being used within our company). MS Word seems to integrate well with Internet Explorer because MS Word can save .docs as HTML and Internet Explorer has an MS Word edit feature in the top of its toolbar.

Does anyone have any experience with building a website that retrieves data from a database using Internet Explorer, calls MS Word to edit the data, and then store the changes back to the database within the same user session?

If anyone has any practical experience or can point me to resources on the internet, I would GREATLY apprecaite it! This is a major obstacle for our company.

[DaveAtIFG]

I was hoping someone would jump in here Bradley, I'm "coming up empty." I'll "rally the troops," mention your post in the mods forum, and perhaps someone can at least suggest some places to look.

[Air]

You mention DB2 are you running on a mainframe or AS/400? Or DB2 on AIX?

If you are on one of those and have TCP/IP installed then there is a "DBI" for DB2 that can be used with ASP and VB to do what you are suggesting. You should ask IBM, they will be able to tell you the appropriate data base interface to use for making SQL requests to DB2 from VB.

[Woz]

Hi Bradley,

first, be carefull using MSWord to generate html files as the code is very bloated to say the least.

You should check out Air's suggestion but I will also throw you a question. Are you going to stay with DB2?

A collegue of mine is currently doing a H U G E site for a law company using FileMaker Pro (FMP). All the letters are stored in FMP and can be changed and personalised at will through the web interface using any browser. This type of approach may be better suited to you as an easier and cleaner option particularly if you want to allow users to change their resumes. Anything that may complicate things for the user needs a second look and, in my opinion, interfacing through word may do just that. However it would mean starting all over again with a new databse.

Just an idea to think about.

Onya
Woz

[Fusioneer]

Hmm we have come across similar issues when building a document indexing app (Cold Fusion)for intranet use.

2 main options we came up with:

1)Use the database to store a reference to the file instead of the file itself. Write code to exec local app(Word)to edit document. Note you may want to prevent IE from opening/editing the document and force Ms Word to open it - see below URL.

Internet Explorer Opens Word Documents
[support.microsoft.com...]

Benefits here are less overheads for the database, files are stored and edited in native format (no HTML) - Word outputs horrible HTML anyway.

2)Store the file as a BLOB or binary object in the database (sounds like this is what you are doing) in either HTML, text, Word, PDF or whatever. You can also use native apps to open/edit with this method but database overheads are much higher. Files are not stored in their native format either (as discrete files anyway) - there are a lot of good arguments for this.

We opted for #1 ;)

BTW Dev environment was Cold Fusion/SQL Server.