Version 20 of SnODBC

Updated 2005-10-27 15:31:49 by escargo

A/AK:

SnODBC is a binding for ODBC API. It is distributed as starkit that may be sourced to have a snodbc package available. The starkit may also be run to see the documentation.

URL: http://www.sw4me.com/snodbc.kit

The starkit contains binaries of Ffidl and dict extensions compiled for Windows-x86 and Linux-x86.

2005-10-06 For the convenience of those who don't use tclkit and starkits, ready-to-use binary distributions were prepared:

SnODBC is mostly compatible with TclODBC, but there are some subtle differences. See the documentation for details.

The main good difference is that SnODBC supports Unicode character types. Other advantages of SnODBC include:

  • Support for ODBC GUI: you may bring up datasource selection dialog to establish a connection, and save the connection string for subsequent connections.
  • Additional support for metadata: rowid, primarykeys, procedures and procedurecolumns metadata queries.
  • Support for scrollable cursors: navigate back and forth on the result set when the driver supports it.
  • Setting NULL representation for a statement in order to distinguish NULLs from the empty string value.

The extension is developed for Tcl 8.5; this starkit was created with some help of the sugar macro processor to translate {expand} syntax into the compatible replacement for Tcl-8.4. See using sugar for forward-compatible {expand} for a syntax macro that does this job.

The version of the starkit presented here may be used with Tclkit 8.4 (tested on 8.4.9), or with any Tcl 8.4 distribution supporting starkits, such as ActiveTcl, dqkit, TixTclKit.

Once downloaded, the starkit may be updated to the latest version with the sdx tool:

 sdx update -from http://sw4me.com/cgi-bin/starsync snodbc.kit

2005-09-16: Some changes were made to improve TclODBC compatibility. Now the vast majority of scripts using TclODBC will just work with SnODBC as well.


snichols 09-16-05 I am curious did you use Ffidl to create the C wrappers for the C based ODBC API?

A/AK 09-17-05 I use Ffidl to create the TCL commands that call ODBC functions in ODBC shared library. There is no C functions in SnODBC, and, consequently, no compilation is required when Ffidl is already available.

snichols That's pretty wild. So Ffidl is what exposes the C based ODBC functions to Tcl?

A/AK Yes. Ffidl is great at exposing C based functions to Tcl at runtime.

snichols If I have some time I may try using it to expose some LDAP functions to Tcl using the popular Mozilla LDAP C API.


escargo 27 Oct 2005 - I downloaded the Microsoft Windows version and found two problems.

  • The file permissions on ffidl06.dll were not executable, so I had to change the permissions before it would load.
  • The pkgIndex.tcl file uses the odbc namespace, but it does not ensure that it is created.

Once I made those changes, I was able to load snodbc.


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