Hi Leslie -

Do you get individual fields into your DLL, or is it one long string, or is
it a delimited string? In other words, no matter what DB you are using,
somehow you have to have some idea of the field you are passing through to
whatever DB you are using. For example, I would expect that it would cause
you problems if you passed a date value to a field containing memo data ...
etc.

My experience (Interbase, Paradox, dBase III, IV, Sybase, SQL Server, DB2,
Oracle) is that for access to a server DB, at some level you either have to
use a native class (a class providing APIs that you can call) specific to
each SQL (for example, the Borland BDE used to use the SQL Links libraries,
Crystal Reports has a different DLL for each server DB, that kind of thing)
or you have to use some kind of generic access method, like the BDE - which
simply wraps all the work. But there is, as far as I know, no way of
getting around the fact that different DBs use different SQLs - even if
they are all ANSI 92 standard ...

What I would do in your case is check what the windows date format is (if
you are developing on the Windows platform) and decode the string that way
- then re - write the string into a format that is understood by all SQLs -
I believe that "DD-MMM-YYYY" is such a format. I.e., it doesn't matter
whether you are using Oracle or dBase III, date passed to the database in
the format "09-OCT-2003" will be understood by all of them.

In my experience with client apps, your problem isn't with Interbase /
Firebird, by the way. If your users are using any of the Microsoft
products, they are generally able to change the date format themselves -
and even make thier own date formats. In South Africa, as in Australia, the
"standard" date format is "dd/mm/yyyy".

But I have often found users who will set thier own date format, or
continue using the default US standard of mm/dd/yyyy. My solution has been
to either decode whatever date I am getting, using the Windows short date
format, and build the string I require, or in some cases, to actually
change the system settings every time the application runs.

Writing in vanilla C, In would suggest that you ask the system to show you
the man pages on date format or dates - there are dozens (if not hundreds)
of them.

Hope this helps,

Tim


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