I am planning a time and attendance app as a sister product to our current payroll app.  The latter one was developed with VFP.  Because of the complicated labor laws here both applications require a lot of data massaging (SELECTs and more SELECTs), for which VFP is ideal.

On the other hand, we are evaluating using Strataframe for the front end to ease into your world.

The question is, how should the application be layered to take advantage of Strataframe facilities yet place the majority of the calculations in a VFP component?  As user enters data and calculations are performed by the VFP layer, how would the data be shared between the layers?

TIA,

Alex

We have a VfpDataSourceItem that can directly talk to a VFP database.  However, if you want most of your calculations to be in VFP, when you'll most likely want them to be in stored procedures in the dbc or in .prgs that are visible from the dbc.  Then, you can use the BusinessLayer.FillByStoredProcedure to retrieve the values from the sprocs or the DbDataSourceItem.ExecuteStoredProcedure() method to call sprocs directly.  Other than that, if you need to interface with VFP, you'll need to write some sort of COM or use some sort of cross-process communication; named pipes are ugly in VFP, so we generally use UDP across the loopback if we need cross-process communication.

Hi Ben,

The VfpDataSourceItem would be best if you just need pull data from the VFP database, right?  Does FillByStoredProcedure mean you make a call to a prg that is visible from the VFP database and and data is brought into the business object?  I need to see code for FillByStoredProcedure and ExecuteStoredProcedure() to understand better. Please explain what you mean by "we generally use UDP across the loopback if we need cross-process communication". I thought it may be possible to run locally a "shadow" VFP executable that communicates with Strataframe via some DBFs in a local directory.  What do you think?

Thank you for the answer.  Alex

Correct.

No.  This is when you would call a method that is within the DBC stored procedures.  A prg is not going to be accessible in this manner unless called through a VFP stored procedure.

There is really not much to show, bottom line is a procedure must exist within the DBC, for example let's assume that we have a procedure in the DBC named MyProcedure.  You would call it like this:

If it required parms, then you would pass the parms in the second parameter of the FillByStoredProcedure method or create a OleDbCommand with the parameters already set when called.

UDP is a networking protocol that allows a port to be occupied and listened on.  When we need to make two disparate EXEs or applications talk between each other, i.e. a VFP app talking to a .NET app, we create a UDP session within each application that can send and listen which allows us to communicate between the two apps.  You can reference the advanced sample that comes with the framework that shows how to run a VFP application within a .NET environment.

You do not want to do this....talking to a database will be slow, cumbersome, and open up a huge potential for failure at run-time.  This is why we use the UDP method.

Oops... Is there any way to make Strataframe run with VB Express?  I do have full VS, but it is an older version.

Brent, sorry to ask about this here, but don't know where else.  I don't have enough rights to edit a previous command entered by myself.

Thanks.  Alex

ahaaa... so Ben and Trent are two personalities of the same person, Brent.

(I know, I know, silly... I promise to go back to my pills in a daily basis)

LOL IVAN, that made my day!

Keith Chisarik

The install requires a full version of Visual Studio to install.  The reason being that Microsoft has choosen to make the VS Express editions not support the full range of extensibility that the VS Standard, Pro, and Team Suite products do.  The Express editions do not support VsPackages and lots of macro and add-in stuff.  So, our extensibility doesn't work completely with it.  The Express editions are basically meant to allow you to "get your feet wet," but once you're in, if you want to work with just about any 3rd party tool, you'll have to spring for the full version of VS.

The latest version I have of VS is 2003   I uninstalled it a long time ago.

It doesn't seem to make sense to purchase VS2005 now since Orcas is around the corner.   Will Strataframe work with the Orcas beta while the product ships?  Also, do you start the year's worth of updates of Strataframe from the day of activation or the date of purchase?

Thank you,

Alex