Re: Calendars

Posted by webmaster Guido on November 09, 2002 at 15:43:10:

In Reply to: Re: Calendars posted by Jodell on November 04, 2002 at 22:15:40:

: I am working on a similar project: I teach courses and need a calendar for the dates, times, plus notes for co-instructors to add descriptions and meeting places. This is for Instructors to co-plan courses.

: I purchased WallCalendar that has a nice Calendar Component. But, I need a database file. I have Delphi 5 Std with no data base components. I have been looking for components that I can use the TStringlist to Save, Edit a database file.

: I have looked and looked and it seems that either the components offer too much or not enough.

: I do own Visual dBASE but have not used it in three years. I was wondering if I should design the Tables using dBase and then use Delphi Components (which I have not chosen yet) for the Delphi Calendar Front End?

: Am I making it more complicated that it could be?
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Almost none of the third party add-on "database components" work with a non-database version of Delphi: most of them need the Borland database-engine (BDE). A few component sets work without the BDE, but they still need at least two Delphi database components, TDataSet and TDataSource.

The easiest and fastest solution (but most expensive) would be upgrading to a Delphi version that contains the database components. In that case, you even don't need an external tool such as Visual dBase to design the database, Delphi has all the necessary tools. For not too complicated database applications, the development itself is quite straightforward and quick, since Delphi contains an excellent "expert".

The cheapest, but the most time-consuming solution in terms of development, would be to use textfiles to save/retrieve your data, encoding/decoding everything to text-format. With the speed of nowadays PC's, the speed difference of the application compared to a desktop-database solution such as dBase- or Paradox-files, is not noticeable if your database is not too large (a few thousands to ten-thousands of records, depending on the record size).