updating customer database and program

[INFORMAT]

Hi,

Our company develops software for schooladministrations. The ledgislation of these administrations changes very often. So we need a good and efficient solution to update our customers. Our old programs written in FoxPro 2.6 are downloadable on our website (program, reports and database are all together in one zip file).

In C/S software it is much more difficult because reports, program and database are seperated. We must be sure that the user works with the latest version of each part (or when he downloads an update, he downloads just the parts he need to do the update). In some cases it is just necessary to update the database, in other cases just the reports or the program.

Our customers use SQL server 7.0 or SQL server 2000 and the software is written in Visual FoxPro 6.0. Has anyone experiece with this topic or can anyone help me with some hyperlinks? I know this is a very difficult issue (also because of our end-users. They aren't that smart to execute scripts in SQL server,... So I probably gonna write a little program to do this for the end-user.)

Thanks for your time and advice...

Tom
INFORMAT cv

 

[foxdev]

There are many ways to approach this, but seemingly you'd want your client program (the VFP part) to control this.

For example, you could have a table called Version on the server, and it would hold the current database version (you assign the version numbers incrementally, of course).

Your VFP app would also be matched to the same version. So, if the VFP app starts, and it knows it is version 2.3, it then checks the Version table on the server and verifies that it, too, is version 2.3, and it continues.

But if the two versions (client app and database) do not match, it runs one or more .SQL scripts against the database to bring it up to the correct version.

If the reverse is true (the database is a higher version than the VFP app), then I guess you punt: present a message to the user that they need an updated client app, then exit. Or invoke a browser and take them to your download page. Robert Bradley

http://www.agrainofhope.org

http://www.lowcostprints.com

http://www.foxdev.com