Jason Wharton wrote:

> This sounds like something that would definitely help me reach
> my current pending milestone for the 4.x branch.

Hmmm... I was not really trying to do anything that you were
already working on. From your previous posts, and from the way
that v4.9 was altered, it did not seem that you were working on
a unicode version of IBO v4... and I did not want to wait for a
v5 if I could get it working in v4.

>> One of the experimental bits of this process is that I have
>> tried to bring across some ideas from my C++ unicode work...
>> where we can actually convert text (and text blob) fields
>> from whatever character-set they are provided in (Utf8,
>> Win1251 etc) over to unicode. [...]

> This sounds very useful, but it would also be a very
> significant undertaking.

Actually most of the work is done by Delphi and Firebird. Since
FB v2.1.x the relevant character-set is given in XSQLVAR for
text and text-blob fields. At this point they seem to have
skipped array fields (but then so do I so it has not worried me
much.) [Not saying I have got the code perfect yet... but any
mistakes are probably mine rather than Delphi/FB.]

The "trick" will be to get the functionality to work in with
older versions of Firebird where the relevant character-set is
not easy to get... and in these cases I have tried to make it
so that the code would have much the same effect as it had
before. ie. Use the connection character set. The logic being
that older versions of Firebird did not really support this
concept well so people should have been using an explicit
character set on their anyway.

And I still support the old UTF8 column attribute in the new
code - override the default character-set processing.

At this point I have made no attempt to implement support for
custom character sets (I am happy for that to be an IBO v5
thing :-).

> I do have test suites but they are heavily integrated into my
> development environment. Likely they would be difficult to
> uproot and transplant in another environment. What we ought
> to do is get me up to speed with what you are doing and see
> how much can be merged for an official 4.10 release. I will
> take care of the bulk of the testing so that you can focus on
> helping me in this area that I find a bit daunting. Your
> assistance here will be a great catalyst to help me get some
> solid traction and hit the milestone of proper characterset
> support for the 4.x IBO code base so that I can turn my focus
> to IBO 5.x more fully.

Hmmm... I seemed to remember you had something like that, which
is why I asked about it.

I am not a fan of DUnit, but now that it is part of Delphi I
have started migrating some of my test code. A new specialised
base-class has allowed me to force it into something closer to
what I wanted.

Any chance of sharing relevant (core-only) bits of testing code
with me? I could migrate that to the new test regime as part
of the larger project. Being experimental I was hoping to find
the worst of the bugs before getting too embarrassed by showing
others my mistakes. ;-)

I do want to do at least some testing here before passing on
the code - no point sharing until the biggest major holes are
filled. If you cant share I will start writing at least a few
tests of my own.

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing