Hello All,
We are looking for a class/lib that will allow us to do
the following over the internet:

User runs our xBase 1.9 app on their local computer
User clicks a button in app to get current price info for a specific part 
number
App sends a request to our web site (part number) where a part number/price 
database lives
Our web site returns the price data to the app (price and price date)
The app stores the price data in a local database

What would the best, most reliable way to do this be?????

Thank for your input or suggestions.
Gary

"Gary" <tempuser@aerosoft.net> wrote in
news:69e4b471$844e43f$689@news.alaska-software.com: 

> We are looking for a class/lib that will allow us to do
> the following over the internet:
> 
> User runs our xBase 1.9 app on their local computer
> User clicks a button in app to get current price info for a specific
> part number
> App sends a request to our web site (part number) where a part
> number/price database lives
> Our web site returns the price data to the app (price and price date)
> The app stores the price data in a local database
> 
> What would the best, most reliable way to do this be?????

Best, easiest and most reliable way to do this is by using Xb2.NET SOAP:
http://xb2.net/xb2net

Best regards,
Boris Borzic

http://xb2.net
http://sqlexpress.net
industrial strength Xbase++ development tools

LoadFromURL( ). Quick, painless, and ruthlessly efficient. Assuming your 
website can respond to the request, of course.  In the ASINet lib.

Bruce Anderson wrote:
> LoadFromURL( ). Quick, painless, and ruthlessly efficient. Assuming your 
> website can respond to the request, of course.  In the ASINet lib.

Yes, agree. LoadFromURL is nice, cheap and easy, supposed you're a PRO 
subscriber (you have Asinet).

You can make your server-side application issue the info embeded on a XML 
page. Then use XML Library to grab the information.

You can also use NUMTOKEN/TOKEN to get data from a string, fields separated 
say by ";".

Or simply use SUBSTR to separate the fields.

However, a very, very important point :

DO YOU PLAN TO DO IT FOR An ON-LINE TRANSACTION or a BATCH PROCESSING ?

LoadFromURL is nice for an ON-LINE TRANSACTION, that is, one request only and 
other request later.

If you plan to use it for a BATCH PROCESSING, you may have problems. In this 
case, the best to do would be to DOWNLOAD a file from the server , with all 
the prices, using FTP. Then you get the file, and process it LOCALLY.

You can understand that is way, way more efficient to go across a local file, 
record per record, than crossing the INTERNET to get a URL record per record.

Can you understand it ? I hope so !

What happened here on our site ? Someone built a BATCH processing like this 
and, overloaded the server. It has 100 K transactions to process per day. So, 
we have had the server not responding to ON-LINE clients because A BATCH 
processing is overloading the server.

Got it ?

If you plan to use LoadFromURL, also be aware of it's implicit TIMEOUT. Say 
that the server is OUT. Then LoadFromURL will WAIT for 5 minutes ! It'll get 
STUCK on that funcion for FIVE MINUTES ! Very, very cumbersome.

There's a better version, from Phil Ide (Where's him ? ). He's a guy from UK 
that has been very cooperative here on the XPP NGs. I attached his version. 
You can go out there and find the original one. This is a copy of mine here.

If you plan to use FTP for a batch processing, Asinet has that as well.

Other than that, let me know if I can help you somehow, OK ?

Good (URL or FTP) Luck !

See ya !