MDAC 2.5 SDK - OLE DB Programmer's Reference
Chapter 20: OLE DB Core Components

Provider Extensible Data Link User Interface API

The Data Link user interface implemented in MDAC 2.0 enabled users of OLE DB data stores to customize connections visually, as they had done in the past with the ODBC Data Source Administrator.

While all of the potential initialization properties for an OLE DB data source object can be set through the default Data Link user interface, there are no provisions for guiding the user through setting the right properties or for enforcing dependencies among multiple properties.

This section describes the mechanism for implementing provider extensions to the Data Link user interface. The interfaces used are all standard COM interfaces for handling property sheets, and detailed reference information for them can be found in the MSDN Library documentation.

The extensible Data Link user interface provides the following features:

• A mechanism in which the Data Link core component can determine whether the provider has customized tab pages for the property sheet.
  
  
• A callback on the Data Link core component that the provider can use to describe the pages to be used.
  
  
• A handshaking mechanism by which provider pages can pass page changes to the Data Link core component.

The provider implements property sheet tabs that replace the Connection and Advanced tabs within the Data Link user interface.