What is a good way of accessing dBase files using BDE and Delphi?

Question

First of all, I must state that I'm a complete newb when it comes to Delphi, although I did some Turbo Pascal programming in school, some fourteen years ago...

I have a commercial Delphi program which uses dBase database and BDE for accessing them. I basically need to interface another application written in C# to this database, to be able to do SQL operations such as select, insert, update and delete.

Unfortunately using OLEDB against dBase results in broken indexes, only native BDE apps seem to be able to safely access the data.

The general idea was to create a simple Delphi console application which could read SQL statements from standard input (Read/ReadLn) and output CSV data to standard output (WriteLn).

How would I go about doing this?

I have successfully gotten simple TTable-access to work, with the following code:

tbl := TTable.Create(nil);

tbl.DatabaseName := 'Exceline';
tbl.TableName := 'KUNDE.DBF';
tbl.Active := True;

WriteLn(tbl.RecordCount);

tbl.Active := False;

Is there a way I could achieve the same but by executing direct SQL statements instead?

As someone said below, the BDE is seriously deprecated, and you shouldn't be using it in new code! :-) dBase, man?! 1989 called and it wants it database file format back. At least with tdbf (mentioned below) you can drop the horrid BDE-redistributable package. Good luck! — Warren P

kludg kludg · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-11T02:41:29

You can do the same using TQuery component:

qry := TQuery.Create(nil);

qry.DatabaseName := 'Exceline';
qry.SQL.Add('SELECT COUNT(*) AS CNT FROM KUNDE');
qry.Active := True;

WriteLn(qry.FieldByName('CNT').AsString);

qry.Active := False;

What is a good way of accessing dBase files using BDE and Delphi?

3 Answers