Visual Basic Concepts

Using the rdoTable Object

You can use the rdoTable object to map the tables and columns of a data source or create rdoResultset objects from all rows in the table — which is not recommended with RDO. There are very few cases where it is necessary to retrieve all rows from a database table into workstation memory. Many remote database tables are far too large to be downloaded to the workstation.

If you need to examine the table structure exposed by a data source or examine column detail, you can use the rdoTables collection. However, to improve performance, no table meta data is requested from the data source until the rdoTables collection is referenced. Once an rdoConnection is open, you can enumerate the tables and place their names in a ListBox control, as in the following example (which assumes that cn is an open rdoConnection):

Dim tb As rdoTable
For Each tb in cn.rdoTables
   List1.AddItem tb.Name
Next

Each rdoTable object contains an rdoColumns collection that contains details about the data type and size of each column. While it is possible to create an rdoResultset against the rdoTable object, this query can only return all of the rows and is not recommended.