Using the Web Compatibility Checker

Access Services does not support all the data types, relationships, properties, controls, objects, and events that the Access rich client supports. When you create a web database from scratch or use a web template, all the design surfaces you see in Access are designed to show you only the elements that are compatible with the server. Microsoft created these design surfaces for web databases in an attempt to keep Access developers from creating controls, objects, etc. that are not web-legal. It is still possible, however, to create elements in a web database that are not web-legal. If you create an element that is not web-legal and publish it to the server, Access Services does not understand what to do with it and you'll most likely see an error. In more extreme cases, you would be unsuccessful in publishing your database to the server.

To help prevent Access developers from publishing elements to the server that are not supported by Access Services, Access 2010 includes a tool called the Web Compatibility Checker. This tool checks the web compatibility of all the tables in a database as well as any web objects. This tool, however, does not check any data in the tables nor does it attempt to check any client objects other than local tables. If you attempt to run the Web Compatibility Checker on a client object other than a table, you'll actually receive no errors, which can be a bit misleading. The tool, in fact, did not even run on the client object. The Compatibility Checker also does not check any linked tables to other data sources.

You can think of the Web Compatibility Checker tool as a gatekeeper, always making sure your objects are web-legal before you publish your database to the server, import objects into a web database, or make changes to existing objects and try to send those changes to the server. If the tool finds issues during any of those actions, Access aborts the process.