The Visual FoxPro Internet Search Wizard

Microsoft Corporation

The Internet Search Wizard behaves like any other wizard that ships with Microsoft® Visual FoxPro™ database management system 3.0 (for example: form wizard, table wizard, and PivotTable® wizard), but it constructs an HTML document instead of a Visual FoxPro object (for example, a form). This wizard enables the developer to create an HTML document that is automatically bound to Visual FoxPro tables, thus providing the ability to query Visual FoxPro data via a Web browser.

The Internet Search Wizard basically consists of three parts:

  1. Visual FoxPro Internet Search Wizard

  2. Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

  3. Visual FoxPro Internet Server

Visual FoxPro Internet Search Wizard

The Visual FoxPro Internet Search wizard behaves like any other wizard that ships with Visual FoxPro 3.0 (for example: form wizard, table wizard, and PivotTable wizard), but it constructs an HTML document instead of a Visual FoxPro object (that is, a form).

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Script

The CGI script is an executable windows application written in the Visual C++® development system that is a two-way translator between HTTP daemon and the Visual FoxPro Internet Server. In the simplest terms, the client transmits data to the HTTP daemon via a Web browser, which passes the data to a new instance of the CGI application, which in turn translates the data to the Visual FoxPro Internet Server. The converse of this scenario is also true; HTML data is passed from the Visual FoxPro Server to the CGI script, which passes the data to the HTTP daemon, which in turn transmits the data to the client.

The Visual FoxPro Internet Server

The Visual FoxPro Internet Server is the backbone of the wizard. This server is a Visual FoxPro executable that is running in the background performing various actions. When a query is sent to the server from the client, the Visual FoxPro Internet Server runs the transmitted query and sends the results back to the client in an HTML-formatted document.

The interoperability between these three components provides the ability to publish and query data via the Internet. The success of the Internet has shown that a data-querying utility will be an integral part of Internet publishing packages in the future. The Visual FoxPro Internet Search Wizard allows users to easily create HTML-formatted documents based on .DBF files and provides one of the fastest desktop database engines as the back end.