Programming Question VBA

Megadeth4168

I'm stumped!

Anyway, I've written a police/fire dispatch Database with Access and a good amount of VBA. They have been using my program for over a year now, which is cool...

This is really a 2 part operation... I did the Database side of things and our GIS guy did the mapping side of things....

How it works is that the EMS/Fire Trucks have laptops in them which have both the GIS map software and Access Database loaded up. When they are called on a run they first pull up the database and look at the History of the address, alarm information ect... I have a search function programmed for the address search.... They then click the ArcGIS program on the taskbar and run the address search function there to pull up the map of their location (as well as nearby locations of hydrants ect..)

Now the part that is confusing me.....
They asked if I could program the search so that it passes the address variable from my database to the search function on the ArcGIS. I know the ArcGIS also has VBA built into it... I know this has to be possible, but I'm not really a programmer...... I can do easy to moderate programming tasks, this one seems a little beyond me.

If anyone has any ideas or can point me in a direction to where I might find what I'm looking for I would appreciate it.

Thanks

Webmaster

If there's an easy/common way you should be able to find out by contacting ArcGIS - it depends on whether they created something that allows an other app to pass search strings. Does it support searching through a command-line?

corey1980

SOAP and XML would work well but I don't know if they are supported in VBA.

Megadeth4168

I have to contact ESRI land see if they have some code examples for this already.

I have figured out how to open the GIS software through a command button in Access, however the GIS program will already be open. I'll keep looking and trying different things. Thank you for the help so far.

JDMurray

It is possible the ArcGIS application exposes a COM interface that allows other applications (written in C/C++/VB) to communicate with it while it is already running. This would be the typical way two Visual Basic applications would communicate under Windows. Check if there is a programming manual or software development kit for ArcGIS. The docs and (hopefully) sample apps will describe all of the ways that external programs may communicate with it.