I posted this to the development group a few weeks ago but since I'm not a member, I received a message saying a moderator had to approve the post. It hasn't been posted there yet so I'm posting it here.

Just curious if there has been any discussion about expanding aliases to allow defining just a path to a directory where multiple databases may reside?

The reason I'm asking is that in some situations, my apps are designed to allow the users to archive fiscal data. In general, they have a main database for active information and an archive database for current archive data. Each fiscal year, the information in the current archive database is copied to a new fiscal archive database and then cleared for the new fiscal year. That means that there could be years of data in individual databases but they all reside in the same directory.

Currently, to use aliases, I would have to add an alias each time a new DB is created. If there were a way to specify an alias for a particular directory, I could use that to build a complete database name something like:

servername:directoryaliasname:databasename

That would allow more dynamic building of connection strings. At the moment, I usually store the database path in each users settings file and just tack on the database name as I need it. However, if the location changes, each users settings would have to be changed. It would be nice if I could declare an alias in the alias.conf file to use as a base directory.

Any thoughts?

Woody (TMW)

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