How to Return a Generic .Net DataSet from the OpenEdge AppServer
- 8th June , 2007 by Sam in .Net / C#, Progress OpenEdge
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Recently at work we needed a good, and easy, way to get data stored in our massive ERP system running an OpenEdge database to some of our .Net apps. At first, we just had ASP.Net connect directly to the database through ODBC which was good enough for our prototype. However, if we were to continue using this method it would require our Microsoft developers to learn a totally new and convoluted schema. Plus, they would have to use embedded SQL statements like…
** dbBroker and GetDataTableBySQL are part of our in-house framework but you can get the idea.
Embedded SQL is a code maintenance nightmare in my opinion. I’ve never liked mixing languages like this. Fortunately, OpenEdge comes with a better way call the Open Client Toolkit (sorry, no link). To quote the product literature the Open Client Toolkit is used “to generate .NET, Java, and Web services proxies for accessing business logic.” In our case we used it to create DLLs which we can reference in our Visual Studio projects.
[I will post another article on the specifics of using ProxyGen from the Open Client Toolkit to create .Net DLLs]
This process works much better as our MS developers can just make a call to the methods in the DLLs (I’ll write about this is another article) and not have to worry about the ERP’s crazy schema while our Progress developers can actually create real business logic procedures to aggregate data. The only problem with this scenario is that every time we want to add to the AppServer code we must regenerate the DLLs and make the .Net apps reference them properly. Talk about a pain in the ass.
Here is how we I solved this problem. Read the rest of this entry »
