Mark Schonewille <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I might start a project that should connect a Revolution front-end to > a FM Pro database. One of the candidates to do this is ODBC. Reading > the archives, I can't help thinking that the combination of ODBC and > FM Pro may not be the best option. Does anyone have good experiences > with ODBC and FM Pro? How easy or difficult is it to accomplish this?
Hi Mark, We have several installations that routinely extract data from FMP via ODBC. It works fine, with a few minor limitations (which may by now have been dealt with anyway, these were set up a few years ago). The app itself routinely extracts data from various different databases, so the good thing about FMP via ODBC, as far as I'm concerned, is that configuring the app in these cases to extract from FMP was reasonably trivial. It is necessary to throw a dialog on screen to tell the user to make sure that Filemaker is open and has these databases open. However, one caveat: for the last 18 months, we've been having horrendous problems with one client using this facility. Their database solution, built for them in FMP by a third party developer, is the most insanely architected I've seen in a long while. Apart from a shudder of disgust, I didn't think it would be a problem; but in fact, especially as the client has added considerably more data, we've found this impacts on getting the data out over ODBC. In some cases it times out; even worse, in some cases it doesn't, but doesn't return all the data. I mostly blame the madmen who so badly designed the database solution; but the fact is that it 'works' viewed through FileMaker itself, but fails in various ways over ODBC. So just be aware, that while I don't think you should have a problem, if you were to try to connect to an exceptionally badly designed database (eg one in which extracting simple items of data required FileMaker to undertake chains of calculations) you might run into difficulties. - Ben _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution