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

Write AS400DataSourceItem, check.



Tell me how realistic this is to save some up-front work. Initially all we need to do for phase one is export, read, and report data. Could I just convert/modify the SELECT type methods from the AccessDataSourceItem template to create a sort of read-only DbDataSourceItem. All I really want to do do is populate a BO, not update it (yet).



Then later I could layer on the more complicated (I'm sure) INSERT, UPDATE, and concurrency methods?



What do you think? Is that viable at all?



Thanks.

Keith Chisarik

If all you want do to is create a read only DB2 item, then it will actually be quite easy.  You will probably have it done before the day is out.  You'll still want to copy over the SqlDataSourceItem and modify it, but you can take the methods like UpdateRow(), and CreateInsertCommand(), etc. and just throw a NotSupportedException from within them.  Then, all you need to do is modify the CreateSelectCommand() method to match what the AS400 is expecting.  As far as I can tell, the only thing that needs to be modified up front is to remove the TOP keyword and make it a LIMIT at the end of the command (you'll see where it is when you look at the code).  The other methods that need to be changed are one-liners... like CreateBlankDbCommand()... it just returns a new OleDbCommand object, or whatever provider you're using.