Chapter 3. Building a Visual FoxPro Application for SQL Server

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Why Three- Tier ?

• Creating the SQL Database and Loading Your Tables

• Writing the Sample Application

• The Form Template

• A Search Form Template

• The Data Tier

• What's Next ?

Even if you haven't started using three-tier data access in FoxPro, you certainly have heard of it. What's the big deal? Is this something that you need to learn? In this chapter, you'll discover that

• You absolutely need to learn three-tier data access.

• It's easy.

• The library described in this chapter can be used with your very next project.

In this chapter, we'll build a data access layer to communicate with either DBFs or SQL Server. And we'll build it in such a way that there is absolutely no code to change when you move from DBFs to SQL tables. We'll even include an upsizing wizard to migrate the data for you. We'll talk about the things that you don't want to do in SQL if you want to simplify programming (always a good thing). We'll use a data access layer, which gives you the ability to use DBFs, SQL Server, a WebConnection XML server, or XML Web services built in Visual FoxPro 8, the best upgrade yet. The code for this chapter is written to be compatible with Visual FoxPro 7, but in subsequent chapters we'll add features only available in versions 8 and higher. It might surprise Microsoft, but not everyone has the latest version of their languages.