We are providing these components as a free addition to the ALP. They are not part of the any of our products but will be provided as addition with all products that may need DB components as an alternative to the existing powerful component sets like ADO/ADOX and DAO. Customers are free to use the NOSC components not only with the ALP applications but with other products built using any language and tool. We want to not make the licensing a problem thus once obtained NOSC can be used in any of your projects and you may reuse the code working with them without need to buy a separate license for the components.

NOSC are useful mostly for desktop programming but there is no problem to use them on the server side if you need to port some application with minimal or no changes. Take care   to deny ODBC dialogs if porting to a server side.

Current version

The first version of the NOSC needs ODBC to be installed on the PC. This situation is more typical for the desktops than the ADO availability. ALP applications that need basic DB access may use NOSC if ODBC is expected to be preinstalled on the target platforms. See also Preinstalled DB APIs avalable on the different Windows platforms. Current version is built using the MFC DB classes but we encountered many problems in the MFC classes and new version of the NOSC will be built from scratch later this year.

Note that NOSC is not automatically installed. You can find the dll in the nosc directory of the installation package but if you want to install it you will need to register the dll manually or you can build a setup file that installs it.

Classes:

NOSC consist of two classes:

• Connection - Responsible for connecting to the DB, Executing textual SQL statements and producing read-only Recordsets over the opened DB.
  ProgID: newObjects.odbc.SConnection
  CLSID: {3BDEDB4B-2FE2-11D5-999F-0040332BA2EA}
• Recordset - Read only recordset class. In the current version it must be created through the Connection.GetRecordset method.

Remarks:

In the current version of the NOSC recordsets are read only. All update/insert/delete operations can be made through an execution of the textual SQL statements using the Connection.ExecuteSQL method.

NOSC uses the current user language settings for character conversion.

Portability note: Assuming that NOSC will be most often used with the MS Jet/Access databases it is recommended to convert your MDB files to the MS Access 97 format (supported by the Jet 3.51 and prior versions) in order to avoid installing the last Jet engine.