INFO: Accessing Data in an Active Document Application (190623)

SUMMARY

A Visual FoxPro Active Document application is a Visual FoxPro application that can be hosted in an Active Document container such as Microsoft Internet Explorer.

When you develop an Active Document application, special considerations must be made when determining how the application will access any required data.

MORE INFORMATION

When an Active Document is hosted in Internet Explorer, the application is downloaded to the local disk before it is executed. At this point, the Active Document application behaves the same as any other local Visual FoxPro applications with respect to data access.

The most common implementation of a Visual FoxPro Active Document application is over a corporate Intranet. The Active Document application offers many benefits over a traditional application with respect to application deployment and maintenance, and the underlying local area network (LAN) in the corporate environment offers a mechanism for easy access to remote data. In the corporate Intranet scenario, the Active Document application accesses data on a remote computer through the use of a mapped network drive or a universal naming convention (UNC) path that points to the remote data.

When deploying an Active Document application over the Internet, some other mechanism for accessing the data must be provided. Visual FoxPro provides no native capability of directly accessing data over the Internet. One possible solution is the use of ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) to access data over the Internet from within a Visual FoxPro Active Document application. For more information regarding ADO, refer to the Microsoft ADO Web Page at the following URL:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ado270/htm/pg_introduction.asp