Scott Salisbury stopped at my place on one of his globetrotting jaunts and really opened my eyes to the wonders of VB and web front ends to an RBase database!
First on the VB front: I consider myself an advanced beginner or low-intermediate programmer. Using his form generator .exe, his ODBCData.dll, and a template project of his, I was able within a few hours to connect to an RBase database and have an attractive main menu form. A button on the main menu brings up a form with a search button for the clients, does an '=' search first, then a 'like' if it doesn't match, puts the results in a list box. Clicking on a customer showed all their invoice header data in a grid. Clicking on any invoice displayed the data in an editable form with complete add/edit/delete functionality. Clicking on an invoice also displayed all the invoice detail and all the payments in 2 separate grids on a tabbed control. There was data from 4 separate tables all on this one form! And I did it in probably 2-3 hours. I was able to easily modify the project for my own wishes, could easily add a column to the edit form, etc. This is a huge selling point for my RBase clients. I can write a very sophisticated VB front end, yet they can still have RBase on their desks to do R> prompt searches, design their own reports, etc. Now on the web front: I am TOTAL NEWBIE on this! Using free downloadable software we turned my lowly Win98 laptop into a web server. Then using free downloadable web app design software, I was able to modify 3 template scripts Scott gave me to connect to my RBase database, ask the user for search criteria and display the results in a table! Probably took me 45 minutes to do this. I connected to the web, found out my dial-in IP address, had a friend dial into my computer and he was brought right into my program and was able to search my database! I would imagine that this free stuff isn't as powerful as the stuff you have to pay for. Or am I wrong? Until now I've never explored the freeware world! Anyway I'm encouraging you to check out Scott's work! Karen ================================================ TO SEE MESSAGE POSTING GUIDELINES: Send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: INTRO rbase-l ================================================ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: UNSUBSCRIBE rbase-l ================================================ TO SEARCH ARCHIVES: http://www.mail-archive.com/rbase-l%40sonetmail.com/
