Upsizing your VFE APP to SQL Server

There are a lot of good reasons to move the data store of your app from VFP tables to SQL Server. Of course this also presents challenges for a developer who is used to working with local data.

Many enhancements in VFE 2005 have made it easier for the VFE developer to meet those challenges and to design robust client-server applications as they have desktop apps, relying on VFE to do a lot of the heavy lifting while allowing them to concentrate on the business problems.

We will be using the new sample application to demonstrate principles you will find essential in either upsizing a current VFE application to SQL Server or in designing an application intended for SQL Server from its inception.

Along the way we will have an opportunity to point out new features in the framework, discuss best-practices for client server applications, and show design and interface tricks which will de-mystify the upsizing process.

As in the VFE training CDs with which most of you are familiar, we will show a lot of step-by-step, reproducible processes that will make you immediately productive.

Data conversion issues and strategies will be discussed and demonstrated, including:

• Using Xcase to do the modeling and conversions

• Using the VFP Upsizing wizard

• Using SQL-Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) to upsize the data

• Writing VFP Code to upsize the data.

• Data Type Conversion Issues

• Changing primary key and foreign key conventions

We will convert the views from local to remote and cover:

• Dealing with Syntactical differences

• Case Sensitivity in VFP vs. SQL Server

• Taking Advantage of SQL Server timestamps

• “Gotchas” in Remote views

We will explore the connectivity issues in some depth as this is a very new concept to fledgling VFE/SQL Server developers and even those who have deployed such applications may find new and useful functionality in VFE2005.

We will discuss and demonstrate setting up connections and issues that arise at design time vs. at run-time

We’ll cover:

• Using DBC based connections

• Connection String based connections

• DSN based connections

We’ll work with the VFE Connection classes and get an in-depth understanding of using the Connection Manager to ensure sharing available connections and maintaining transactional integrity. We will talk about using the cSqlTransaction class to wrap the functionality of managing an all-or-nothing SQL Server transaction.

As we walk through up-sizing security to SQL Server we’ll discuss issues of designing views to return records based on security, showing front-end and back-end techniques

Other topics will include:     

• Form Redesign

  • Upsizing a form based on table data

  • Upsizing a form that uses an “inappropriate local view.”

•  Debugging SQL Server Issues

•  Data redesign for client-server & VFE

• The case for normalization

• Primary keys

  • VFE love’s GUIDs

  • Issues with SQL Server Identity Fields

  • Getting Identity Field values from VFE

• Using Server Side Views

•  Stored Procedures

  • Creating Views based on Stored Procs

  • Calling Stored Procs from your VFE App

•  Extending VFE’s Client-Server Functionality

  • Retrieving connection strings at runtime.

  • Making use of transactions outside of a data entry process

•  Deploying a SQL Server App