Visual FoxPro Stage 3 (Advanced)

A fast-paced practical course covering the advanced features of VFP.

Designed for experienced VFP developers, this course will help you create sophisticated applications which take full advantage of VFP's advanced features. The focus is on integration within the Windows environment. Client/server, Internet, OOP and user interface issues are also covered.

Suggested length: Three days

Delivery

We can bring this course to your site, anywhere in the UK, the rest of Europe, the USA or Canada. The course is also available for one-to-one training at our office in Edinburgh. For further information, please see Overview of training options.

What you will achieve

At the end of the course, delegates who meet the pre-requisites will be able to develop sophisticated applications which fully exploit Visual Foxpro's advanced features. You will also learn how to work with back-end databases, and how to approach the development of Internet-based applications.

Pre-requisites

To benefit from the course, you should have at least six months experience of developing VFP applications. You should also be familiar with the topics covered in our Stage 2 course, especially VFP's OOP features.

Course contents

Developing client-server applications

• Introduction to client-server concepts and terminology.
• Using ODBC to connect to back-end databases.
• Remote views vs. SQL pass-through.
• Design issues; optimising data access.
• The development process: prototyping with local views.

Extending VFP with the Windows API

• Overview of API functions, calling sequences and data types.
• Using API calls to extend your application's functionality.
• Getting information about the Windows environment.
• Accessing and updating the Windows Registry.

Integrating and communicating with other applications

• Understanding ActiveX Automation, COM and DCOM.
• Using ActiveX Automation to integrate with Microsoft Office: the Office object model.
• Sharing documents with Word; using Word for spell-checking and mailmerge.
• Passing data to and from Excel; calling Excel's workbook functions.
• Working with registered document types; using ShellExecute().
• Working with Outlook folders.
• Exploiting the Windows Scripting Host.
• Calling VFP functions from other applications and languages.

Exploiting ActiveX controls

• Overview of available controls.
• How to acquire, deploy and register controls; dealing with common problems.
• Some examples of ActiveX controls: date-picker, treeview, listview.

Internet-related features

• Adding a web browser to your application.
• Publishing VFP data as static web pages.
• Sending and receiving e-mail from within the application.
• Using the Internet Transfer Control for FTP and HTTP transfers.
• Developing web-based VFP applications with FOXISAPI.

Going further with OOP

• Planning, designing and building a sound class library; communicating between classes.
• Using polymorphism to simplify class design.

User interface issues

• Techniques for developing a sound, consistent and friendly user interface.
• Progress-reporting; interrupting the event loop.

Version

The course is designed for Visual FoxPro 7.0 to 9.0. About 60 percent of the material is also relevant to VFP 6.0.