Mark Wood

Session Info

Mark Wood

Mark has been developing applications in Omnis since Omnis 5 on the Mac and PC, since he graduated from Bristol University with a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, now too long ago to put a date on.

He has had extensive experience writing client server applications in Omnis studio porting a suit of applications from Omnis 7 to Studio, and from local Omnis data file access to Sybase, Informix and MS SQL Server.

In addition to his hands on development and leading teams of developers and support staff for various commercial Omnis projects, Mark has spent a lot of time in the class room between over the last 14 years, teaching C++, Windows development and SQL.

Session Info:

DML to SQL
In this session I will present SQL equivalents to the commonly understood DML commands - including how you can relate Omnis Connections to Joins in SQL for building lists, and how we can use SQL cursors to support DML Find, Next and Prev.

This technique can be used to support an application that needs to continue to work with Local Omnis Databases, and also access SQL server databases, but also as a jump start to porting an application to SQL, before you go OO, or put all your business logic in stored procedures and functions on the server.

If you still have a DML application , you might be interested to see the automatic conversion of a Omnis library so that all its DML commands call an equivalent methods in a code class, a tool for creating tables from you File Formats, populating keys and foreign keys, and pumping the data in to a SQL server.

We can cover how DML equivalents, in line Begin SQL, and Studio Table classes can live side by side in the same applciation, and how you can use Views, Indexed Views, functions that return tables - to evolve an application.

XML
If you need an introduction to XML or want to see what you can do with it from Omnis Studio then drop in to see how we can read, create, parse, and add element nodes and attributes to XML files.

We will cover searching for Nodes using XPATH, and 'walk' an XML document using DOM. See how XLST transformations enable us to quickly change an XML file into a different format, which is useful for creating a presentable version of the data or for converting from one XML format to another.

The session will be based around a library developed to transform and modify a PDF Income tax return XFDF output, that has been automatically completed using Adobe's FDF Active X, into an XML file that is compliant for electonric Submission to the UK's HMRC (Tax man).

I will mainly be demonstrating how to talk to Microsofts MSXML parser as a component from a studio library.

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