Discussion forum using automation

[SteveSartain]

Gents

I'm looking to gather information from the "discussion forum" within EA in order to publish it to an intranet site and potentially push information the other way (back into EA).

I understand that I can install EALite on all of the machines, but this seems overkill for the majority of cases.

Is there a way that I can either use the automation model to read/write this data or a method in which I can import/export this data?

Thanks, Steve

[«Midnight»]

Hi Steve,

I have been thinking about something like this myself. At this point I don't (yet) have sufficient interest in my local community to make it worth pursuing, but who knows...

Perhap you could harvest the information you want by reading the appropraite data from the EA repository directly. This would be via a database connection instead of or in addition to your automation calls. This would allow you to gather and massage the discussion contents before publishing to whatever form factor you prefer.

In the reverse direction you would determine what should go into the EA repository and then insert the appropriate records into the database.

Now, all that said I confess that I have not looked at the EA repository to determine where and how this information is stored. The discussion forum feature is fairly recent, so I suspect the data was 'shoehorned' into the existing schema someplace, probably in one or more 'generic' memo fields. You'd have to do some experiments to get a firm grip on this. Further testing would also be required to make sure that when writing new records you correctly populated any linked fields and tables.

Still, given what you want to do this seems like it might be a worthwhile experiement.

David

[SteveSartain]

Thanks David

If I embark down this route I'll probably be looking to create something that I can share with the community (no point in us all doing the same thing!).

The problem I see with getting the data directly is when EA uses the EAP file as a data repository.  Whilst I think I can massage information out of the file, it's highly unlikely that it will be happy with me putting information in.

I'll continue my investigation and post any findings during my travels - in the meantime, if anyone has any great ideas, please shout.

Steve

[«Midnight»]

Hi again Steve,

The reason I mentioned a database connection is that I have been successful in using a 'background' connection to manipulate fields and records that are not directly accessible (or are read-only) with the automation interface.

Several EA versions ago this was a problem with EAP files, since I had to close them via automation, make the update, and reopen them. At that time EA locked EAP files exclusively; it does so no longer.

There are all kinds of caveats when sharing Jet files. Check the MS knowledge base for some warnings regarding sharing Access databases across a network. Still, this is likely worth pursuing.

David