Re: New Era support of ODBC Sucks!!!

You should take a look at Delphi. According to the documentation, it can handle multiple, simultaneous ODBC database connections, and is a whole lot easier to use than New Era. As for New Era, or more appropriately, New ERROR, we have been struggling with it at my company for some time now. We are currently looking into other client-server development tools for developing business applications, with Delphi being one of them. sfidai@aol.com (SFidai) wrote: >We looked at New Era and found it to be completely inadequate. what we >wanted to do was very >simple. We are in process of integrating a contact management product >which runs under >windows with our application which is based on informix-4gl. We wanted to >write routines to >extract contact data from this database and post them to customer table on >our informix >database which resides on Unix server and vice versa. The job involved >accessing this PC >database in ODBC mode and use embeded SQL in New Era to access informix >database. >We had no luck. New Era supports Informix database pretty well, but, when >you want to use New >Era to access ODBC database, it falls very short. >Let me explain: >Windows painter knows only informix database. Even in version 3.0 they >have no plans to add >ODBC support to WP. That means, If you want to access non-informix >database, according to >New Era CCL/OBDC Reference manual, you have to create shadow informix >database. Design >all your screens using that and at the time of compilation and runtime, >use odbc libraries inplace >of informix ones. If you have this manual, refer chapter 2, read the >whole chapter you will get an >idea how kludgy and stupid ODBC implementation is. On page 2-23, it even >suggests modifing >4gl code generated by WP to correct data type mismatch issues between >shadow informix >database and the target database. Guess what will happen if you change the >code generated by >WP? What if you want to change a screen layout ? >Also, by default, when you compile New Era, it uses CCL/informix >libraries. If you want to access >ODBC database, you have make a global change for the installation. That >is, according to the >procedure in the same chapter of CCL/ODBC manual, you have to copy >cclodbc.dll to ccl.dll in >$INFORMIXDIR\\bin directory. You have to copy ixconno.4gh to ixconn.4gh in >$INFORMIXDIR\\incl directory and make some changes to ixstmt.4gh file, etc. >All these things >look very scary to me. This means, once you make a changeover from >CCL/informix to >CCL/odbc, all you programs have to use ODBC. >One of the major problem or requirement with using ODBC is that it does >not support embeded >SQL stmts. Informix says INFORMIX-4GL programs could be converted >seamlessly to New Era, >you just have to re-code screen I/O stmts. Imagine what will happen if you >do that... You can >not, at all, access ODBC database from your application. That route is >close for you. The reason >is you can not selectively add ODBC access program by program basis, you >have to make >global change in which case all your converted informix-4gl programs will >not work. >We were very disappointed with this find. At least for this project, we >are looking at Microsoft >Visual Foxpro 3.0. >Sadru Fidai.