>I haven't tried any of the cool new stuff like ADO, DCOM, etc, and I would like to postpone that pleasure for as long as possible. Is there a way to share data form a plain vfp database without going to too much trouble?. I posted a similar question yesterday.
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>I need to share data with two differente databases: an Informix residing on a UNIX server and an SQL on an NT server. No problem to read the data from there but, when the programs driving those databases (4GL and PowerBuilder) try to read data from the vfp database ODBC complains with the following message:
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>"Invalid field definition 'DELETED()' in definition of index or relationship"
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>I would hate to discover only now that I can read other apps data but that Iam not able to expose vfp's without major database modifications.
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>Can anybody help, please?
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>TIA

I haven't tried it myself but it appears pretty easy to build an automation server rather than an .exe.
That way you can keep all your VFP structure/logic intact. You could easily just pass whole VFP command lines as parameters.

Still, I am sure that the ODBC driver could be made aware of, at least, the deleted()function, that is implicit in c/s databases. It is easy to foresee problems accessing other databases but I would never had thought that I wuold encounter problems exposing my humble vfp database.

To make thinks worse, the previous occasion that I found this problem was at a customer's site that had started utilizing an italian CASE tool that promised to move, effortlessly, an application form vfp to any number of c/s databases.

As for creating automation servers, I am not planning to look seriuosly into it for a long time (whatever long time means in computing). By the time I start I am sure things will have changed again and I will be happy to learn the latest fade, glad that I missed all that terrible stuff that was there before and that was so difficult to work with, unreliable, etc. Of course, this is still a release 1.0 technology and has kept some parts of previous technologies so that it is still not 100% reliable but, if you know what to avoid from previous versions, follow carfully the release of new service packs and experiment yourself you will avoid all the major problems.

Or not?

thanks