Possible to connect directly to Prestashop database with MS Access?

[HankMcSpank]

I'm pondering moving to Prestashop (from Opencart...which IMHO sucks wolf's cookies) ....but I see the Prestashop api is gonna be tricky for me using VBA (which is the native language for MS Access), I was therefore wondering if anyone successfully connected MS Access directly to Prestashop's mySQL database to allow Prestashop Customer order data to be imprted directly into Access tables?

 

Many thanks

[Scully]

I haven't done that. But my considerations are...

 

From a practical view

From my point of view using MS Access might not be the best way to handle data. What would you then do with the data imported to MS Access? The shops logic is part of PHP code, views with TPL, Javascript and some more. VBA would - in my opinion - not be the place to add more functionality. And it would add to complexity.

 

From a technical view

Access can connect to MySQL servers. However the MS Access drivers should match the MySQL Version in use on the PrestaShop Server.

More technical details here:

 

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-odbc/en/connector-odbc-examples-tools-with-access-linked-tables.html

Edited August 1, 2017 by Scully (see edit history)

[HankMcSpank]

I haven't done that. But my considerations are...

 

From a practical view

From my point of view using MS Access might not be the best way to handle data. What would you then do with the data imported to MS Access? The shops logic is part of PHP code, views with TPL, Javascript and some more. VBA would - in my opinion - not be the place to add more functionality. And it would add to complexity.

 

 

I'd simply be writing a query in MS access to identify any (new) Prestashop orders that access doesn't know about ('unmatched' ), then appending the associated corresponding data onto a table in MS access (things like product, price, currency, quantity, customer names, billing address, shipping etc)....if it works, it ought to be a lot quicker than having to work out how to code up an API in VBA to use with prestashop.

 

Hmm, perhaps I may have to quickly knock up a test Prestashop & have a dabble!

Edited August 1, 2017 by HankMcSpank (see edit history)

[Scully]

It's a way but probably not the easy approach for a quite straight forward task. Years ago we have written a quite simple query framework which connects and retrieves data from prestashop database, formats the result for screen display allows any query to be exported to CSV/Excel.

 

Once we get a new requirement, we just add one new SQL statement which retrieves the data, give the query a name and there we go. Adding a new query is a matter of minutes.

And we haven't faced any situation in years where we could not statisfy customers expections with this approach. But of course you can do the same thing with MS Access once the base setup works.