>Does anybody have any suggestions as to how I would utilise a lookup system (preferably indexed) from within a DLL.
>
>What are the options? Would it be best to put the data within another DLL and call this if needed? What are the speed issues? What?What?What?
>
>The initial data will be fairly small (c150k straight data) but another project I will be working on will involve over 1Mb. Main function is to lookup a short text item and return a corresponding equivalent sized item (if found).
>
>Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm planning on starting this project in a couple of days so would like as much info as possible before I start.
>
>Many thanks,

Nigel,

I was reading through the thread you and Paul have going, and thought I would toss in a thought ...

Paul posed the question why not put your data into a dbf. I think I would follow along that trail for a couple of reasons. Principally it makes adding rows to your data set simpler. It may be that your lookup data will never change. Of course as soon as you say that it will change.

One of the things I'm working on currently is a set of enterprise wide business rules to enforce on multiple applications. My solutions to this problem includes one or more DLL's to perform the number crunching and validation. For validation I get a recordset from SQL server where a column and a matching value match the column name and value in a lookup table. If there is no match, the system returns an empty recordset and the DLL generates a fault on validation and forces the user to reenter or reselect. One of the mission critical requirements for this is that it run very very quickly.

I'm using an ADO connection and recordset for a couple of reasons. I can return the ADO recordset into applications written on platforms other than C++, and it is very very nimble.

Just my .02 worth.

Regards,

Jason