Designing Clients for Redirection

When you design client applications, you must make some decisions on redirection strategies. Specifically, you must decide whether to handle redirection within the application and which redirection mechanism to use. The three different redirection mechanisms are as follows:

• Automatic redirection with the DBPATH environment variable
• Administrator-controlled redirection with the connectivity information
• User-controlled redirection with the INFORMIXSERVER environment variable

The mechanism that you employ determines which CONNECT syntax you can use in your application. The following sections describe each of the three redirection mechanisms.