Product overview

Connection client

The connection client holds the main engine to communicate with your application and to interpret the data retrieved.

There are different kinds of connection clients depending on the technology you need to communicate with your application. Type of clients currently available:

• ODBC: the standard way to communicate with all ODBC compliant databases. Any Database providing you a ODBC driver can be accessed using this connection client.

• ADO: this is the activeX plug-in of PRODBX. This connection client is directly accessed by the application providing information.
• Record file: ASCII format files holding record information, typical exported from or imported in the interfaced application.
• Fixed length records file: ASCII format files holing records with a fixed length structure.
• SMS: to interface mobile phone and send or receive SMS messages.

• Mail: Uses MS Outlook to send and receive mail. Mail is interpreted in its separate objects such as subject, body and attachments.
• FileHandler: module handles various ways of reading and writing files as a file object. This includes remote reading or writing using or FTP and HTTP.
• OPC: OLE for Process Control. Plugin communicates with any OPC compliant device. With this module the user is able to communicate with most common brands of PLC's, SCADA systems and instruments.

• @aGlance: communicates with a @aGlance server (product Axeda)

A client holds two PRODBX communication channels:

• Trigger-based: this channels assumes triggers created and running on the source database or the OPC server supporting asynchronous reads. A trigger is a program (in the database's language) run when a record is inserted, updated or deleted. The advantage of having these triggers and trigger-based channel is twofold:
  - Real-time facilities
  - Only changes to the database are exchanged on the network
  (Remark: ADO connection client uses the trigger-based channel)
• Batch-oriented: this channel examines a complete source table (file), evt. with filter, and exchanges all information to the destination client.

Each client can only work for one connection (say application). To exchange data between two databases for instance, you need to start up two clients, each of them working for one of the databases.

The interfaced application or database can have multiple clients working on exchanging information for this application or database. These clients should not necessarily run on the same machine. You may have clients working on separate batch-oriented tasks, have clients working on different PRODBX channels, or have clients working on only retrieving data or storing data. This enables you to tune your PRODBX network and increase performance on the data exchange.

All transactions generated by connection clients are stored in the internal PRODBX database, and therefore written on the hard disk. In case of power failure, PRODBX will not loose any pending transaction.