Re: Client Server / Visual Fox

Hi,
we use ODBC with Oracle 7 and 8, using both SQL-Passthru and remote views. This works very well indeed. You need to watch out for a few pitfalls :
-in some international versions you should use the MS-ODBC driver for Oracle. This one translates the numeric field formats correctly (decimal points as commas) so you don't lose the values after the decimal point.
-your date formats need to be set up correctly in Oracle with the alter session set NLS_DATE_FORMAT='....' command so that the dates in a cursor appear correctly and you can use VFP date routines or TTOC type routines to work with dates / datetime and forms / reports. -watch out for NULL values and empty strings. In Oracle an empty string is a NULL value and selects on a table need to incorporate the Oracle NVL function if you want to include empty strings in results etc. This can be a bit confusing at first, as you don't always know what the updatable cursor sends to the backend for an empty textbox. -be careful with transactions. If you want to apply updates to the database and have rollbacks work, you need to set the transaction property of the session to manual, else each update will automatically generate a transaction and commit it and then it's too late. -we don't always use a DBC for our frontends to Oracle. It's harder but safer to use the Oracle Data Dictionary functions. Things like SQLTABLES() and SQLCOLUMNS() are then always up to date...

Feel free to contact me by eMail, I can send you examples and code fragments.

Ted
On Fri, 08 Oct 1999 17:28:24 +0100, kal <kal_at_ihatespam.com> wrote:

>I am about to embark on a client server project with Visual Fox 6 as
>the front end and Oracle 8i as a back end.
>
>Does anyone have any experience of this (good or bad) that would be
>useful ...
>
>thanks

EMail: knijff_at_bigfoot.com Received on Sun Oct 10 1999 - 16:05:58 CDT