A friend of mine owns a business and they use Maximizer 7.5 with Pervasive DB. They receive 5-10 "sign me up for your mailing list" requests from their website everyday and are now manually entering them in (cut-and-paste). He asked me to help him automate the process.
I am a .NET developer and was thinking I would create a web service that would sit on his office server and accept requests from the website. What's the best approach to get this data into Maximizer?
I read a bunch of forum entries on the Maximizer ODBC and the MXI format...but I would rather hear from people who have done this or have a strong opinion on what's the best approach. I apprciate your help.
I investigated this in Max 9.5, and found that the perl code that was created was flawed in such a way that could turn you or your hosting company into a spam engine. Any hosting company that was concerned about their bandwidth use and reputation as a spammer block wouldn't let you run the code generated, and if you did it yourself, you'd end up blacklisted.
I was surprised to see the code, which appears to use pre-spammer technology, come out of the Maximizer application.
>I am a .NET developer and was thinking I would create a web service >that would sit on his office server and accept requests from the >website. What's the best approach to get this data into Maximizer?
Given that Maximizer is running on Pervasive you'll probably wind up using Maximizer ODBC. That would be the most direct approach.
Posts: 725 | Location: Canada | Registered: July 14, 2000
Rocquestar - I saw the tool to create a webfor and it submits it via an EXE. I don't like that.
Gord - Thanks...this is what I was thinking. By using the Maximizer ODBC, I need to know the table structures and what data needs to be inserted where, right? There's no API. Could you point me in a direction to get started? Samples, database dictionaries, etc. I really appreciate it!
>Could you point me in a direction to get started?
The complete documentation for Maximizer ODBC and the Maximizer APIs is part of the Customization Suite, which can be purchased separately. However AFAIK you cannot buy the Customization Suite for v7.5 any more because that version of Maximizer is no longer supported.
Yes, the webform creation script requests the OS of your Web server (IIRC) and if you choose MS, it generates an exe, but if you choose *NIX, it generates a perl script (which can be used on a MS box running perl, FTR) but the perl script isn't secure. I can't imagine what the exe would let you do!
Either way, it's a sub standard way of executing the functionality.
