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ruby-on-railsherokuexcelrails-postgresqlvba

VBA Heroku integration?

I am wondering what might be involved in connecting an Excel VBA application to the hosted database behind a Heroku Ruby on Rails application. Is this possible? My application cannot accomplish all of the functionality I need in the cloud only. The VBA application would be used as part of a system to print and encode proximity "smart" cards. Thank you for any and all tips on how best to implement this.

Solution

  • Number of options here depending on how you want to connect. I would consider exposing an API in your Heroku app that your VBA could consume (if possible).

    Failing that;

    1. The present Shared Database won't let you connect directly to the database so that's a no no.

    2. The new beta shared postgres 9.1 (https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/4/26/heroku_postgres_development_plan/) will let you connect to it from outside.

    3. Use one of the Heroku DB addon providers such as ClearDB which is a mySQL provider which allows direct access to the database.

    4. Bring your own database which you could host on an external server and have your Heroku app connected to it (watch out for latency) and then you can connect your printing app directly to that Db.