this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I can really emphasise with Samir. Working in healthcare I’m basically limited to just the Office applications. However in the past few years I’ve been able to cook up solutions by reading / writing to file based databases, and using VBA to generate and bind to HTML contents on the fly for the built in IE11 instance. It’s as close to getting to some kind of web-stack within the confines of IT Sec in healthcare.

[–] seedbrage 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is interesting, can you tell us more about how this is done?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

For the backend I used the ADO library to create a MSAccess DB on a shared network folder. Then it’s a matter of using VBA to generate SQL commands to same library to read / write records from the DB.

For the frontend, I use VBA to generate a HTML document from the fetched data. For the IE control in a user form, you can then write the HTML to it. During this process you can bind local VBA variables to any of the html elements in the page.

A common flow would be:

  • User clicks an element in a table
  • simple JS on the page does some calculation, stores a value in a hidden input and clicks it.
  • the user form variable detects the click in the monitored element, reads the changes, and acts on it.

I also have VBScript to act as the launcher by copying the excel file to the local machine, and launching the local copy. This solves the concurrency issue.

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