Generic Windows comm client

Dave,

Why not construct a stored procedure on the Sql Server DB and use ODBC via Cloverleaf(R) to communicate?

Thanks,

Jim Kosloskey

David,  if you do a search on Google or your favorite search engine. There are tons of free library for C++ or Visual Basic. I know that you will have to do some real programming to make them work. But then it is all in your control and you can customize to meet your sites requirements.

But to Jim’s point. I ran an odbc process to both get and post data to a MS-sql box using ODBC and never had the abend problems you are talking about and over all that for me was a very effect method of doing it. The scripts I had were very generic and reusable for a verity of different database I dealt with.

John Hamilton.

You might also consider writing you comm client in Tcl.  With the Active State Tcl package for windows you have all of the Tcl features you are used to (almost) and more.  I have built comm clients in Tcl to test reply handling that received messages saved them to a file and replied with an ACK.  It is really pretty simple, espcially if the part you are writing acts as the socket client.  In which case opening a socket is pretty much just like opening a files.  As for reading and writing, it is the same as for a file.  One caveat is that it is good to use flush with sockets, and I usually not with files.

Doing your comm client in Tcl also has the advantage of reinforcing a skill set that is useful in Cloverleaf development, namely Tcl skills.

Also you could run the tclhttpd and use the Cloverleaf http post protocol.  The tclhttpd is extremely easy to get running on windows, and pretty easy to attach some CGI to it and that could be your client.  The bonus of that approach is that it moves you in a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) direction.