ADO recordsets on the client

[Donald]

I have just read the following by Bob Barrows on another post and am
extremely concerned as (like him) I have spent a
long time developing an application using disconnected ADO recordsets.

"I gave up trying to use recordsets in the client about a year
ago.....Unfortunately, we kept running into machines here and there
whose MDAC installations somehow became corrupted, preventing the
client-side ADO code from working. After a few Windows reinstallations,
it became clear that ADODB recordsets do not belong in client-side
code."

I am a novice programmer working on my own, self-taught from books etc.
I was totally convinced by what I read to process as much data on the
client as possible, and initially wrote my web application in VBScript
using RDS. I was very annoyed when Microsoft dumped that much-heralded
technology.

I then decided to use the http_request object to xfer ADO recordsets to
the server, and the recordset save method to xfer them back to the
client in xml format.If, after being promoted for several years, these
methods are now deemed unusable, how can I quickly learn another
technology that WILL WORK?

I must add that I am extremely annoyed by the commercial actions of
Microsoft in leading me down at least 2 technological cul-de-sacs. Do
they agree with Bob's analysis, and do they have any plans to sort out
the MDAC mess that he describes without my being forced to upgrade to
DotNet?

Donald


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[Bob Barrows [MVP]]

Donald wrote:

> I have just read the following by Bob Barrows on another post and am
> extremely concerned as (like him) I have spent a
> long time developing an application using disconnected ADO recordsets.
>
> "I gave up trying to use recordsets in the client about a year
> ago.....Unfortunately, we kept running into machines here and there
> whose MDAC installations somehow became corrupted, preventing the
> client-side ADO code from working. After a few Windows
> reinstallations, it became clear that ADODB recordsets do not belong
> in client-side code."
>
> I am a novice programmer working on my own, self-taught from books
> etc. I was totally convinced by what I read to process as much data
> on the client as possible, and initially wrote my web application in
> VBScript using RDS. I was very annoyed when Microsoft dumped that
> much-heralded technology.
>
> I then decided to use the http_request object to xfer ADO recordsets
> to the server, and the recordset save method to xfer them back to the
> client in xml format.If, after being promoted for several years, these
> methods are now deemed unusable, how can I quickly learn another
> technology that WILL WORK?
>
> I must add that I am extremely annoyed by the commercial actions of
> Microsoft in leading me down at least 2 technological cul-de-sacs. Do
> they agree with Bob's analysis, and do they have any plans to sort out
> the MDAC mess that he describes without my being forced to upgrade to
> DotNet?
>
> Donald
>
>

I was describing my personal experience, not making an official MS
announcement.

The application I described is still in production (almost two years now): I
have not rewritten it. For the vast majority of machines it works fine. For
several machines, especially those runing XP, there was an issue getting the
"rs.Open xmldoc" statement to work. For most of the machines with this
issue, an MDAC upgrade solved the issue. However, there were a couple of
machines which already had the latest MDAC version. Reinstalling MDAC failed
to resolve the problem. I don't know what those people did, although I
suspect a windows reinstallation/repair was involved (with W2000 and XP,
MDAC is installed as part of the OS and therefore is "protected" by Windows
File Protection, which I suspect contributed to our inability to fix the
problem). Again, this app is being used on at least 200 machines in our WAN.
Less than 20 of those machines exhibited the problem.

So seen in that light, maybe the problem was not that bad, but at the time,
I made the decision to never use recordsets on the client again. Instead I
use XML documents, using MSXML Parser methods to provide the functionality I
was getting from the ADO recordsets.

Oh! Another issue with client-side recordsets was encoding: since ADO uses
utf-8 to convert the recordset to xml, my application cannot handle many
international characters. You may want to keep this in mind.

Bob Barrows

--
Microsoft MVP -- ASP/ASP.NET
Please reply to the newsgroup. The email account listed in my From
header is my spam trap, so I don't check it very often. You will get a
quicker response by posting to the newsgroup.

[Donald]

Many thanks Bob for your clarification. Sorry if I overreacted a bit,
but I'm sure you can understand how I must feel with the dumping of RDS
and the general difficulty of troubleshooting web client applications.

I wonder if anybody else could share their experience of implementing
ADO recordsets on the client. I use Visual InterDev 6 and find it a bit
hit-and-miss debugging a lot of client-side code via breakpoints,
especially with several windows open at once relying on onfocus events.

Donald


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