Our biggest customer uses an AS400 as their database. The very limited programming I have done for them was years ago using Perl and ODBC. Most of the work we do for them currenty is done in RPG but they are now asking for stuff that is better suited to .NET, specifically ASP.NET, for their customers to view inventory on the web.



I have been looking and have some leads but if someone here has some practical expreience with something that works ( a data provider), I would sure appreciate it.

Keith Chisarik

I have a prototype working for my AS400 data access project, I now want to convert the project to use Strataframe.



How do I take what I have to create the connection....



Dim oConn As OleDb.OleDbConnection

oConn = New OleDb.OleDbConnection("Provider=IBMDA400; Data Source=192.168.42.100; User ID=xxxxxxx; Password=yyyyyyy;")

oConn.Open()



and make it into something like this the framework requires...

'-- Visual Fox Pro

'DataLayer.DataSources.Add(New VfpDataSourceItem("", "myconnectionstring"))



as I dont see a datasource item for OLE.



I realize I cant use the ConnectionManager with OLE.



Thanks.

Keith Chisarik

I would use either the OleDb* objects or some other ADO.NET provider, like the one from DataDirect (http://www.datadirect.com/products/net/index.ssp).  Once you have the provider chosen, you will need to create your own DbDataSourceItem, like SqlDataSourceItem.  Your best bet is going to be to copy and modify the SqlDataSourceItem class's code file to create your own DbDataSourceItem for DB2.  The DbDataSourceItem class creates all of the actual SQL commands from the QueryInfo objects that are supplied by the DataLayer within the business objects.  It will take some work, and you will probably want to setup some unit tests to make sure it's all working, but you can use most of what is in the SqlDataSourceItem, because the two are very similar.  You can also cut out pieces of the implementation, for example, if you don't want to be able to support stored procedures.  The AccessDataSourceItem class uses OleDb* objects, but does not support stored procedures, so it is much smaller than the SqlDataSourceItem or OracleDataSourceItem.