Climbing the learning curve

I've spent the last week getting Firebird to work in my occupation psychologist's office. On my development computer, this is very easy, as the FB server runs on the same computer as the development system, but in the office, the FB server runs on a computer server, and the programs accessing this server run on different computers.

Eventually, after a lot of huffing and puffing, I got FB running in the configuration that I want: server program on server computer, client programs on client computers. In the process of doing this, I wasn't able to utilise the 'aliases.conf' file of FB successfully; this is a system in which each client program uses an alias to access the actual database data. The alias allows one to move the database file from location to location without having to redefine within the client program the physical location of the database file. This is fine in theory, but I couldn't get it to work in practice (the problem lies in the fact that at home, the file is on the same computer as the client, whereas in the office, it isn't).

In the end, I solved the problem by ignoring aliases, and storing the database location in the client computer's registry. I had originally intended to do this in the client program, but after a few minutes cogitation, I realised that this would not be a good idea, as the same code would have to be duplicated in every client program. Accessing the location from the registry is not the problem, but rather saving the data in the registry (which would involve a 'find file' dialog).

With this in mind, I sat down yesterday to write a small program which displays the data saved in the registry, along with the possibility of adding and editing this data (I'm not going to bother with deleting values at the moment, even though this would be simple). The program is akin to many other simple database programs that I have written, although with two very important differences:

1. the data is stored in the registry, not in a database, meaning that the access methods are completely different
2. the data is displayed in a list view and not in a dbgrid

I have never used a list view before, but was able to find simple code which explained what I needed to do.

I have also been porting a program from using the BDE to Firebird; to warm myself up, I took a simple program (actually two programs) which has a small database. As I wrote before, the screens which display data are fairly easy to convert. Adding data is more difficult, and this time I went a stage further than the first program which I ported: I learnt how to use a generator in order to provide an auto-incrementing value. In the BDE, this happens automatically, but in FB one has to do this manually.

The major problem in porting an application would seem to be converting the data from one database format to another. Whilst there is no problem in exporting and importing integer and string values, there is a minor problem with boolean values (BDE has them, FB doesn't), and a major problem with dates. This is the next problem to be cracked. Fortunately, the database which I am porting only has about 45 records (two dates per record), so I added the dates manually, but the major program suite which I will port in the near future has over 3,000 records (not a huge amount for mankind, but large enough) with two dates per record, and there is no way that I am going to add those dates manually.

So this week, I've learnt the following things

• how to install FB on a network
• how to access FB from client computers on that network
• how to use the list view component
• how to use an FB generator for auto-incremented integers
• how to insert/update a date into an FB table [to do]

That's enough for one week.

Fortunately (and purposely) my MBA load is very light at the moment, so I don't have to devote more than five hours on a Friday morning to this on-going project. The accountancy course is very simple - for me, as I spent years of my life working on the material which is being presented - but apparently is difficult for people when it's the first time that they come across it.