I have a Visual FoxPro application used by small groups of users in different offices (separate databases). I am looking for a way to move the reporting component of the app to the Cloud. For now, it is not feasible to rewrite the whole app for the Cloud - data entry must continue in the FoxPro app. Can Servoy be used to efficiently “pull” new or modified records from the local FoxPro tables and update a SQL database in the Cloud? I know that you could upload the FoxPro tables in their entirety to a folder on the Cloud server and read directly from them with Servoy. But I would like the Cloud database to be in SQL format and kept up to date constantly throughout the day as records are updated with the FoxPro app. Is this easily done with Servoy? I have no experience with Servoy yet.
If anyone has had experience using Servoy for this type of solution, I would greatly appreciate your advice or comments. Thanks.
I assume the local FoxPro tables are located on local file servers (of each office) and are not on client pc’s. Instead of pulling the data into the cloud which could give a security risc I would push the data to the cloud from the local servers. This could be done by VFP, SQL Server or a Servoy Headless client. After that a Servoy solution could be deployed on the cloud server to provide the reporting options.
We do this - we have a customer with a LAN-based Visual FoxPro ERP application who want their customers to be able to view their account details online.
We have a server in the cloud running a Servoy web client solution and a SQL Server database.
Our customer has a Windows service on their local server (on the same LAN as the VFP application). This Windows service handles synchronising the relevant data as JSON up to the Servoy application by communicating with Servoy web service (very easy to create). This includes PDF files which are serialised into string form and de-serialised by the Servoy solution.
The way I handle detection of changed records is by storing a CRC32 value against each record in the relevant tables in the VFP application. Then in the Windows service I recalculate that CRC32 and if it’s different, the record has changed and a sync up to the cloud is handled appropriately.
Thank you Alan and Omar for taking the time to respond to my post.
I think to keep my learning curve to a minimum (technology for communicating with a web server is new to me), I would prefer to use VFP to push modified records up to the Servoy server. I could build that function into the existing VFP application, which sits on a file server, not the users’ computers. Do you know where I could find some sample VFP code that shows how to do this?