Design Stage.

Hi,

I'm in the middle of designing a piece/pieces of code to help simplify my life at work. I've done some VBA coding in the past and that is relevant to this concept. Basically, I'm refreshing reports one at a time through running a sql statment populating a recordset and then passing the results as parameters to refresh a report and then the report gets saved in a filename structure based on the parameters passed. This report gets refreshed many many times and it takes about 2 - 3 mins per refresh. All of this code is done using VBA.
I have access to a couple other remote machines to which I could pass these variables to as well and cut the total time to refresh all reports down considerably. So where I need guidance is in the understanding of what/how to interface the main portion of my code above that contains the record set and these remote machines that will somehow receive the variables passed to them. Through some initial reading I think I need to use COM to get this done, but not exactly sure. My concept involves passing parameters to these remote machines and when the first machine becomes available it will request to have another set of variables passed to it until the record set is completed. So in total maybe 15 machines refreshing reports at a time. I understand I will obviously not be using VBA, but more likely just VB and just refrencing the object model of the application. So for the main piece of code that generates the record set and passes the parameters would be one piece of code the other would be a piece that sits on each remote machine that accepts these parameters refreshes the reports, saves and then asks for another set of parametes from the main piece of code.
Can anyone help with understanding how I will pass these parameters to remote machines, and if COM is the best/easiest way to accomplish this.
Thanks in advance.
Joel

Joel ...

You could just write the parameters for each run to a text file, and put all the text files with a specified name convention in a common network directory folder. The "Remote" operations could do a directory on the folder, and if there are any properly named files there, rename one (I like to prefix 'used' files with "z-" because they alpha sort to the bottom of the list!) and use it to generate the proper report.

You could build this in pieces and test the concept piece by piece.

Good Learning and Good Programming!

There could potentially be somewhere around 5000 sets of parameters that the reports need to refresh with. Ideally I would like to avoid writing these sets of parameters to text files that would be picked up by the remotes, although it is an excellent idea. I would like to try and use COM if that indeed is what I should use to pass these parameters to the remote machines.