Connect to web service in MS Access with VBA

Question

Is it possible to connect to a web service (for example send a HTTP Request) via VBA in Microsoft Access? For example, the user clicks a button on a form, then a HTTP Request is sent to a web service that responds with OK.

Has anyone done this before?

Note: VBA, not VB.NET.

Answer 1

This is code I've used quite successfully with Access 2003. It's from the interwebs, copied and re-copied ages ago. It creates a XMLHttpRequest Object, sends an HTTP GET request, and returns the results as a string.

Public Function http_Resp(ByVal sReq As String) As String

    Dim byteData() As Byte
    Dim XMLHTTP As Object

    Set XMLHTTP = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP")

    XMLHTTP.Open "GET", sReq, False
    XMLHTTP.send
    byteData = XMLHTTP.responseBody

    Set XMLHTTP = Nothing

    http_Resp = StrConv(byteData, vbUnicode)

End Function

sReq is the URL; the function returns the response. You may need to make sure ActiveX Data Objects are enabled under your References (in the VBA editor, go to Tools > References).

Answer 2

This is the code , which I used. You need to first reference Microsoft XML V6 for this code to work.

Public Sub GetPerson()
    'For API
    Dim reader As New XMLHTTP60

    reader.Open "GET", "www.exmple.com/users/5428a72c86abcdee98b7e359", False
    reader.setRequestHeader "Accept", "application/json"
    reader.send


    Do Until reader.ReadyState = 4
        DoEvents
    Loop

    If reader.Status = 200 Then
        Msgbox (reader.responseText)
    Else
        MsgBox "Unable to import data."
    End If
End Sub

Answer 3

I have used the "Microsoft Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit 2.01" toolkit (available here) on a few projects. It worked pretty well for me, although I also wrote the web services it was talking to, so I had the luxury of being able to fiddle with both ends of the process when getting it to actually work. :)

In fact, I just upgraded one of those apps from Access_2003 to Access_2010 and the SOAP client part of the app continued to work without modification. However, I did encounter one wrinkle during pre-deployment testing:

My app would not compile on a 64-bit machine running 32-bit Office_2010 because it did not like the early binding of the SoapClient30 object. When I switched to using late binding for that object the code would compile, but it did not work. So, for that particular app I had to add a restriction that 64-bit machines needed to be running 64-bit Office.

Also, be aware that Microsoft's official position is that "All SOAP Toolkits have been replaced by the Microsoft .NET Framework." (ref. here).