The Administration application

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The Administration application is a dbbee application that enables users to add, read and modify Access database or Excel spreadsheet records online. To protect your database and to make the application safer we made this application password protected. This way it can only be used by you and the people you authorize.

Your dbBee credentials are automatically added to the application, so you can use your dbbee user name and password to access your admin app.

To allow other people access your admin application online and even use it simply add them as authorized users during app creation in the "authorized users” section in the administration wizard. You can add as many users as you want.
Another great feature of the Admin application is its ability to serve multiple users at the same time. This means that you and other authorized users can modify your Access and Excel database online at the same time from different computers and even different parts of the World.

There are few differences between using an Access database and an Excel spreadsheet.

The biggest difference between Access database and Excel spreadsheet with Admin application is deleting records from your database. Record deletion will be enabled only if you are using an Access database. Deleting records from an Excel database using online Admin app is not possible.

If you have to delete rows from your Excel sheet, that has to be done manually and is a little bit more complicated.

1.    First you have to download your database using Database manager. To learn more about database manager, please read this article.


 
2.    Open the downloaded file using Excel, select the entire row that you want to delete, right-click it, and select "Delete”


3.    Save your file

4.    Upload the database back to the dbBee using the "Database manager” in Overwrite mode
 

The other difference is the "Unique Identification Field” or UID. Although it doesn’t matter if you are using an Access database or an Excel spreadsheet, you will need to define a UID field in order to build an Admin app. I won’t waste space on explaining what the UID is and how to use it, because we already posted a blog covering all about the UID (Click here to read about the UID), instead I’ll focus on the differences. If you are using an Access database for your application, and table that you are using has a primary key defined, the wizard will recognize that as UID, and select it automatically. Unfortunately this won’t work if you are using an Excel spreadsheet (for simple reason – there’s no such thing as a primary key in Excel). If you are using an Excel spreadsheet, you will have to select a UID field manually or let wizard create it for you.

Sometimes using an existing field from your spreadsheet as a UID field can be tricky because all the values in that selected field must be unique, otherwise the application won’t work. If you don’t have that kind of field or don’t know which one to select you can let the Administration wizard create one for you, and that is the best and easiest way of creating a UID field.

If Administration wizard does not recognize a UID field when it opens the selected table it will display a little green button labeled "click here” in "Unique row identifier” section (as shown in the picture below). To let wizard create UID for you, just click this button.


If you have any questions or need any help regarding your dbBee projects please do not hesitate to contact us.