Dynamic Properties

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Developers familiar with the DAO object model have probably had some experience with DAO's dynamic properties. DAO's Properties collection contains information about all of an object's defined properties (such as the DAO Recordset object's Updatable property). The Properties collection also allows you to retrieve information about user-defined properties.

ADO has a dynamic Properties collection, though it serves a different purpose than DAO's Properties collection. ADO's Properties collection contains Property objects that store information about database system features.

Different database systems expose different features. For example, secure Microsoft Access databases require a system database file (System.mdw). Microsoft SQL Server has options for using standard or integrated security. With RDO, you would need to provide database system information in the connection string or by making ODBC API calls to take advantage of the unique features of your particular database system. It would be impractical to attempt to make features such as these explicitly available through the ADO type library. Instead, ADO makes these features available through its object model by means of the dynamic ADO Properties collection, which is reserved for these database or provider-specific features. It does not contain information already available through the type library.