Advance Steel automatically creates and configures all data sources needed for the program to run. All data sources created by Advance Steel are, by default, using local databases (e.g. AstorDetails is configured to use C:\Program Files\Graitec\AdvanceSteel\Steel\Data\AstorDetails.mdb).
The following are all the steps necessary to configure AdvanceSteel to use a shared database on the network.
Requirements
Advance Steel must be installed on the local user computer (it is not necessary to install Advance Steel on the server computer).The operating system for server computer must be Windows 2000 or higher.
This tutorial will show the steps of sharing a single database by multiple users on the network. In order to share all Advance Steel databases use the same process as described below.
Sharing a database over the network
1. Create a folder on the server computer (e.g., Data) and share it with full access rights for everyone. This folder must be created on a partition using the NTFS file system.
2. Copy the database to share (e.g. AstorDetails.mdb) into the folder previously created (Data) and make sure the database is not read-only.
3. Open the AstorDetails.mdb file properties in order to change its security settings.
First, disable "Allow inheritable permissions from parent to propagate to this object" option (a dialog box will appear and the Remove button should be clicked). This is necessary because the folder in which this file is located has full rights and the database should not inherit them. Once the option is disabled, user "Everyone" will be automatically removed from the list of users allowed connecting to the file.
Next, click the "Add button" to add users allowed to connect to the database and set permissions for each of them. The following is an example of the process described above (user "user_name" is allowed to read the database):
4. a) For Advance Steel 6.1 to 7.1:
Run the AstorDSNConfigurator.exe tool on every user computer and set the AstorDetails datasource path to point to the folder on the server, as shown in the following figure.
Steps 2 - 4 must be repeated in order to share other Advance Steel databases.
4. b) For Advance Steel 8.1 and newer:
Open the file DatabaseConfiguration.xml in the Graitec\AdvanceSteel\[Version number]\Configuration folder on every user computer and set the AstorDetails path to point to the folder on the server, as shown in the following figure.
