On 03-Dec-2004 Tim Bunce wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 10:56:27AM -0000, Orton, Yves wrote:
>> It would seem that its reasonable to expect the
>> DSN thingee to be queryable so you can say:
>>
>> my %fields=DSN->driver_needs_fields('DBD::Sybase');
>>
>> And then find out which fields you need to ask for (and maybe even what
>> regexes they should match to be considered valid :-) ( port=>/^\d+$/,
>> server=>/^[\w.-]+$/, .... )
>>
>> Note im talking about a hypothetical module, I havent had time to review the
>> actual proposed module yet. My point is just that functionality like what
>> was described sure sounds useful to me.
>
> I agree. But it's not as simple as a regexp since the values for some
> items can influence what other options and values are valid.
>
> I've often thought it would be nice to have some kind of interface
> similar to ODBC's SQLBrowseConnect:
>
>
> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2v7luw/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.db2
> v7.doc/db2l0/sqll1402.htm
>
> Tim.
I've not been following this too closely but SQLBrowseConnect is a great idea.
SQLBrowseConnect is how ODBC applications can provide all the required
connection attributes to a driver without having them hard-coded in the
application. A call to SQLBrowseConnect returns a list of the
compulsory attributes required (and possibly potential values if it is
multi-choice) and a list of optional attributes. The application can request
the values (or just one value at a time) from the user then feed them back to
SQLBrowseConnect - it repeats this until all the compulsory attributes are
supplied.
Martin
--
Martin J. Evans
Easysoft Ltd, UK
Development
