Visual Basic Concepts

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The UserConnection Designer

The UserConnection designer uses Visual Basic's ActiveX designer architecture to provide design-time support for programmatic data access. It allows you to create connection and query objects (based on the RDO rdoConnection and rdoQuery objects) at design time. These connections and queries are persisted as project-level objects. You can pre-set properties, define new properties and methods, and write code behind the objects to catch events.

Note   The Data Environment designer is an improved version of the UserConnection designer. The UserConnection Designer is for RDO programming only.

This provides a simplified method for responding to events raised from connections and queries as well as for calling stored procedures and client-defined queries at run-time.

Here are the basic steps to using the UserConnection designer:

  1. Enable the designer and insert it into your project.

  2. Use the UserConnection object's property page to establish connection information and specify settings for properties that can be set at design time.

  3. Create new Query objects for the connection by selecting stored procedures from the target database or inserting SQL code for user-defined queries.

  4. Configure each Query object by setting properties on its property page.

  5. Write Visual Basic code that creates an instance of the new UserConnection class and calls any of its queries as methods.