Re: Very basic question from a beginner

Am 08.04.2012 16:03, schrieb Jean MAURICE:
>
> I am very new to PostGreSql and ODBC but an 'expert' in Visual Foxpro. 
> I wanted to try VFP as a client of PostGres. My laptop is under W7-64. 
> I 'installed' the ODBC driver via Stack Builder. All things seemed to 
> work well but nothing appears in th ODBC Sources Manager (I apologize 
> I must guess the english names from the french ones ...).
>
> What have I missed ?

As Adrian explained you would see defined Datasources (DSN) in the 
Source Manager.
In such a DSN is all the information needed to reach a database.
So you create a DSN "my data" and describe there what driver to use, 
host-address, db-name, user, password ...

Later in VFP you should be able to select one of the defined DSNs and 
VFP knows all neccesary details.

BTW there are 3 types of DSN.
File based ... there is a textfile somewhere that holds the informations.
System DSN ... the admin defines a DSN that all users of the system can 
access.
User DSN ... the user defines a DSN that only he himself can access.

Probaply you might be interested to figure out how you can access the 
db-host without a pre defined DSN.
You can stuff all the details into a connection string and use this 
instead of a DSN.
Basically that should be the same as what the DSN-Manager is doing for you.
The advantage is that you don't need access to the DSN-Manager on the 
client system like when you give someone else an application. That way 
he doesn't have to create a DSN or you don't need some fancy installer 
that does it for him.