I have been experimenting (more like messing around) with ways to create an API to VFP data.
The reason for this is to be able to leave our existing or other third party VFP apps doing what they do but provide the information within them to other parties via an API.
I quite easily created a simple REST API using Node/Express and a ODBC/OLEDB package, but I found the package providing the connection to the data source either lacking documentation or difficult to setup.
Having started my thoughts with stacks, like the MEAN stack I knew there was so much information and so many packages out there that make working with data sources like Mongo/MySQL etc so easy.
I then ventured into MariaDB and its CONNECT engine type allowing me to add data as a table into a MariaDB database from an external source, it’s not importing this data just linking to it.
Once added which was a simple as CREATE TABLE customers ENGINE=connect table_type=ODBC connection=’DSN=mydbc’ I could query away.
Going back to node I can now use packages which help me use MariaDB as a datasource 😊
Just wondered if any of you had been down this route, or similar?
Because some of the applications I need to do this with are not ours I don’t have the option of saying why are we still using VFP data instead of a backend like Mysql or SQL Server in the first place.
TIA
Chris.