At 06:20 AM 15/09/2003 +0700, you wrote:

>Until I created persistent fields on the TIBOQuery/TIBOTable. (Design
>time, Right click on the component, add all fields, for example). When I
>do this, suddenly everything revert back to the normal default format.
>
>I'm not sure whether this is a 'bad behaviour' or 'normal behaviour'
>since the docs do mention that the Connection's FieldsDisplayFormat will
>be used UNLESS overridden at the Dataset level.

In fact, this means that, in the native dataset, you can set global
attributes at the connection level, per table.column, and then set the same
attribute individually on the TIB_Column object in the dataset. If that
setting is present, then the connection-level setting is overridden. With
the TDataset-compatible datasets, instantiating the field objects causes
both the connection-level and dataset-level attributes in the
InternalDataset to be ignored.

>In a way, declaring a
>persistent fields qualifies as 'overriding' the setting (since the
>fields have their own DisplayFormat property).
>
>The main question: is there any way to enforce this 'connection-wide
>setting' when I'm using persistent fields?

No, not if you instantiate the VCL persistent field. Then, you must use
the field object's attributes (DisplayFormat, etc.)

>Finally, mr Marco Menardi's paper (thanks!:) is the first one that shed
>some light on these features of IBO. Are there any papers/docs that I
>should read for more information on the subject? The online FAQ is a bit
>painful to use if you don't know what to search for...:)

http://www.ibobjects.com/TechInfo.html

However, it's fair to say that the TI sheets are more focused on native
IBO. On the whole, the TDataset-compatible components work like the VCL
ones. This is deliberate, of course, because people doing conversions
often want to keep code they wrote in their old apps. There is a "window"
where extra behaviour inherited from the TIB_ wrapping can make things a
bit confusing and Marco has done the community a good service by publishing
his observations.

Helen