Carapace

Database Connectivity

Carapace uses ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) for connecting to databases. ADO provides an interface onto a wide variety of data sources including relational databases, such as Oracle or Sybase, or the Microsoft Active Directory Service.

This section concentrates on accessing relational databases via ADO.

The Db object exists to give simpler access to databases -- it uses the ADO access itself.

ADO Overview

There are three main objects when accessing a database via ADO:

Connection This is the connection onto the database. The connectionString property defines the particular database to be used. Transactions are controlled with the beginTrans and commitTrans methods.

Most of the real work is done via the Command or RecordSet objects.

Command The Command object is used to execute general commands on the data within the database. These commands can have parameters - for example, the command may be a database insert command: the parameters are then the data elements to insert.

The main method on a Command object is execute -- this executes the command and returns a RecordSet object which can be used to manipulate the returned data.

RecordSet The RecordSet object resembles a window onto a set of data contained in the database. This window can be used for viewing the data as well as modifying it.

All the ADO objects are accessed via COM. The following fragment of Carapace script creates the types of ADO object described above:

    (create Dispatch "ADODB.Connection")
    (create Dispatch "ADODB.Command")
    (create Dispatch "ADODB.RecordSet")

Carapace Support for ADO

The ADO objects give you highly flexible access to the data in the database. However, this flexibility comes at a price -- the ADO objects are rather complicated to use.

To help you, the Carapace Db object wraps up the ADO objects. You can use the Carapace methods for high-level control, and yet still access the ADO objects underneath if you need finer control for specific tasks.


Contents Index Current topic: databases Related topics: objects, functions