daAsta Revisited

rbuser

I am having a problem getting the Asta daAsta plug-in working with RB.
I have not used Asta in a long time and I know that I asked these same
questions way back then but I cannot find what the solution was.

1. Do I just copy the daAsta.pas to the Rbuilder source folder? If
not, then where?

2. I did #1 and then added it to the uses section of a test project.
But when I compiled it was looking for RBVersion.inc &
ASTAVersion.inc which I only found in a Rb/Asta Demo. Ok so I copied
these over to my test project directory and changed the version info to
the correct ones:

{$DEFINE ASTA31} // asta 3.1
{$DEFINE RB70}

3. I then tried to compile but get undeclared identifier errors at:

procedure TdaAstaSession.GetTableNames(const DatabaseName: string;
List: TStrings);
.........
...............
Dataset.MetaDataRequest := mdTables; <== Doesn't recognize mdTables.
................................
..................................

I am obviously not doing something very wrong. I downloaded daAsta
from the RB site. Can someone set me in the right direction.? TIA

--
David Farrell-Garcia
Whidbey Island Software LLC

Posted with XanaNews 1.16.3.1

nardmoseley

Sorry to not respond sooner, I was hoping another customer would post here
and help out. I notice there is a customer in a thread above that is using
DADE and Asta. See thread dated 4/29/2004 - 'Asta DADE (child report
works?)'

Jim Bennett is no longer working here. I searched all of our examples and
can find no working examples for DADE and Asta. I am aware that Jim spent
many hours working on an Asta example and was not able to get adequate tech
support from the Asta folks.

We do not have any Asta experience here but I can help you work thru
ReportBuilder related issues. I will leave it to the Asta tech support to
provide expertise on their product.

I recommend that we approach this incrementally. There are a few different
parts to the solution which we can tackle one at a time. I think your other
emails indicated you are using DBISAM. I suggest the following approach.

1. ReportBuilder and DBISAM solution. (no ASTA)

As a first step get the RBuilder\Demos\EndUser Databases\DBISAM example
working properly. This will enable you to implement a simple two step
approach to get the ReportBuilder and DBISAM layers working. There is a
ReadMe.doc included with the example. We have many customers using RB and
DBISAM together successfully.

2. ASTA DADE plug-in

The ASTA DADE plug-in will enable the ReportBuilder query tools to build a
SQL statement that is internally assigned to an ASTA Client Dataset and
executed against the ASTA server.

I installed Asta 3.0 and was able to compile the daASTA plug-in by doing the
following:

a. Add daASTa to uses clause of the application.

b. I commented out the following code. These are not ReportBuilder files and
I searched

//{$I RBVersion.inc}
//{$I ASTAVersion.inc}

and

//{$IFDEF ASTA25}
AstaDBTypes,
//{$ENDIF}

At this point you will need to add an Asta Client Socket connection to the
EndUser form. Using the technique as for the DBISAM plugin you should be
able to choose AstaSession and point the database name to the asta client so
cket.


3. ReportExplorer tables

If you get the above working the next step is to get the ReportExplorer
tables (i.e. folder and item) implemented using Asta Client Datasets rather
than DBISAM datasets. This is probably the most difficult step because these
tables use auto increment fields for the FolderID and ItemID. When a
DataSet.Post is issued, the record will be added on the server and the id
needs to be sent back to the client.

4. DataDictionary tables

This step is optional. If you want to use the RB data dictionary you need to
implement the supporting tables as Asta ClientDataSets. Should be the
simplest step.



--

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rbuser

Nard Moseley (Digital Metaphors) wrote:


Thank you very much for your comments.

--
David Farrell-Garcia
Whidbey Island Software LLC

Posted with XanaNews 1.16.3.1