Summary

This chapter has covered a topic that is large, but hopefully straightforward. FoxPro has simple ways to do simple things, but as the task becomes more complicated it takes more code to get the job done. With Visual Basic .NET, the complexity is about the same for all three types of database operations.

If you're using DBFs, you probably figured out that you don't want to send DBFs using Web Connection's Compression methods , because they don't work with long field names. They require a DBC, and you can't send a DBF that's part of a DBC without sending the DBC, DCX, and DTC files as well. And if you think you can just keep all of your field names to 10 characters or less, go look at the field names your users have been using. I've seen field names 30 characters long in SQL databases.

That's why our examples all have short field names. But in the real world they don't, so you may have problems demonstrating the difference between DBF and SQL access if your SQL tables have long field names.

It may look complicated, but it's really pretty easy to do. If you download the source code, you can have it up and running in 30 minutes, and you can probably adapt one of your own forms to use my library of functions (with a few modifications) in an hour or so. And I should point out that the full version of Web Connection contains hundreds of functions, a number of which would make some of the code that I wrote here unnecessary. In fact, there's a function to package a DBF and its associated FPT for transmission in a single command. And there are many, many more.

I don't write purely LAN-based database applications any more, unless users absolutely insist that they don't want Internet access to their data. This kind of app will run just as well on a local area network as it does over the Internet, with no modifications. And if you happen to be on the road and want to hook up with your database, it's just a phone call away.

Visual FoxPro 8 has great new features for building XML Web Services. I hope this doesn't sound like an advertisement. I don't work for West Wind and don't have any interest in the company. However, you may conclude that even though you could save a few hours' pay by building Web Services in Visual FoxPro 8, there's no better combination than FoxPro, Web Connection, and XML for building database applications for the Internet.