Organization of This Manual

• This Introduction provides an overview of the manual and describes the documentation conventions used.
• Chapter 1, "Using DataBlade API Functions," covers the use of DataBlade API functions in DataBlade modules, categories of functions, and the use of header files, data structures, and the NULL constant with functions.
• Chapter 2, "Using DataBlade API Data Types," lists the DataBlade API data types and describes functions and data structures for handling different types of data.
• Chapter 3, "Handling Smart Large Objects," explains how to use the DataBlade API smart-large-object functions for CLOB and BLOB data types.
• Chapter 4, "Using the MI_FPARAM Structure," describes the function-parameter structure, MI_FPARAM, and how to create and use an iterator function, with a pointer to an MI_FPARAM structure, for returning more than one row of values in an SQL statement.
• Chapter 5, "Managing Sessions," lists the routines that initialize the DataBlade API and explains how to manage client sessions and database server sessions.
• Chapter 6, "Sending SQL Statements," describes how to send SQL statements to Universal Server.
• Chapter 7, "Processing Results,"describes how to retrieve the results of a query and how to process the results.
• Chapter 8, "Saving Rows in Save Sets," explains how to fetch multiple rows from the database server into program memory for processing.
• Chapter 9, "Event and Exception Handling," describes events, callbacks, server exceptions, errors, return codes, and exception handling.
• Chapter 10, "Tracing," explains how to use DataBlade API tools for inserting plain traces and internationalized traces in code.
• Chapter 11, "Developing Server Functions," provides some function development guidelines for connections, transactions, memory management, stack space allocation, file access, and compatibility of client and server functions.
• Chapter 12, "DataBlade API Function Descriptions," is an alphabetized reference for public DataBlade API standard interface functions.
• Appendix A, "Order of Execution of DataBlade API Functions," is a chart that displays the order in which DataBlade API functions should be executed.

Software Dependencies

In this manual, all instances of Universal Server refer to INFORMIX-Universal Server.

Assumptions About Your Locale

This manual assumes that you are using the default locale, en_us.8859-1. This locale supports U.S. English format conventions for dates, times, and currency. In addition, this locale supports the ISO 8859-1 code set, which includes the ASCII code set plus many 8-bit characters such as é, è, and ñ.

If you plan to use nondefault characters in your data or your SQL identifiers, or if you want to conform to the nondefault collation rules of character data, you need to specify the appropriate nondefault locale(s). For instructions on how to specify a nondefault locale, additional syntax, and other considerations related to GLS locales, see the Guide to GLS Functionality.