>>I was wrestling with an interface to a CIM program over the holidays and came up with an interesting solution that I thought I would pass on for whatever it's worth.
>>
>>The program I was trying to interface to VFP used Paradox as the database engine and created a separate directory for each job file it created. I needed to access those directories (literally hundreds) based on a part number entered by the user. What I needed was to be able to create DSN's on the fly. A search of the KB turned up article Q142216, Creating ODBC Data Sources using SqlConfigDataSource. I implemented the information in the article as follows:
>>
>>LPARAMETER tcJobFile
>>
>>DECLARE Integer SQLConfigDataSource in odbccp32.dll Integer, ;
>> Integer, String, String
>>
>>settings="DSN=Job_Files"+chr(0)+;
>> "Description=Paradox ODBC Driver"+chr(0)+;
>> "DefaultDir=&tcJobFile"+chr(0)+;
>> "FIL=Paradox 3.x"+chr(0)+;
>> "CollatingSequence=ASCII"
>>
>>tcNewDSN = SQLConfigDataSource(0,1,"Microsoft Paradox Driver (*.db )",settings)
>>RETURN tcNewDSN
>>
>>I pass the directory path in tcJobFile and check for a confirmation in tcNewDSN. Works like a champ! As stated in the KB article, you may have to create a manual DSN for the ODBC driver you are using and go to the registry to see what entries are required. Word of caution: the driver name (next to the last line of code in my example) MUST be exactly as shown in the ODBC driver manager. I did not notice the space between *.db and the close parenthesis and typed it as *.db), which caused the function to fail. Took me a while to find the problem.
>>
>>The function does not check to see if the DSN currently exists (which is a good thing) so I can use a single DSN in my code and just overwrite it each time the directory changes. Hope this can be useful to someone else.
>
>I, too, did some searching around a few months ago on how to do this. If you ever need help with VFP and Oracle, I have a FAQ article in KB under Client/Server called "Connecting VFP to Oracle". Uses same API call, etc.

Thanks Mark. Our main database source is Informix but you never know what will be "main" next week around here. This current application I'm building has interfaces to Informix, Paradox, and SQL Server. Thanks for the info on your FAQ article.