Audience: This bulletin is intended for application administrators and information technology personnel who are interested in constructing reports and utilities that will use data stored in the Skills Manager database using external software tools.

Accessing data from external applications

Skills Manager was developed with Clarion from SoftVelocity, Inc. (www.softvelocity.com) of Pompano Beach, Florida.  SoftVelocity is a provider of advanced software development solutions -- application code generator, 4GL language, template system, highly optimizing compilers, database connectivity to both transactional and relational database systems, and related products and services for application development.

Skills Manager currently uses the TopSpeed file system (also developed by SoftVelocity, Inc.) to store all application data.  SoftVelocity an ODBC driver that enables users to access TopSpeed databases from external query and reporting tools such as Crystal Reports, Microsoft Access, etc.

We strongly recommend "read-only" use of the ODBC driver as this is the safest way to access the Skills Manager database. A number of our customers have developed such applications.

Modifying data from external applications

We caution against use of the ODBC driver to add or modify data residing in the Skills Manager database. A software application of this scale is quite complex and extensive knowledge of the database structure and organization is essential when making modifications.

Skills Manager offers built-in features for importing data from external sources. These features are comprised of thousands of lines of program code that carry out extensive validation on all incoming data in order to preserve database integrity. This code conducts numerous validations to enforce proper use of numeric and alphanumeric elements, range checking, date and time validations, confirmation of required values, validation of proper parent/child record relationships, prevention of duplicate codes and id's, conversion from lower case to upper case characters as needed, and validation of all coded values against the application lookup tables, and more.  In addition, internal system id's are generated automatically for some records.Proper management of these id's is critical to maintain parent/child record relationships.

It takes much knowledge, careful programming, and thorough testing to reproduce these validations in external applications that are designed to manipulate the Skills Manager database. There have been customers who have tried this on their own with disastrous results.

In summary, we will support customers with respect to normal use of the product as part of the standard product support and maintenance agreement.  Any support outside of normal use such as external application development, recovery of data corrupted or lost due to customer manipulation, etc., will be conducted on a per incident basis at our technical consultation rate.

If you choose to proceed with with database modifications from external applications, backup your database regularly. Keep you backups for an extended period of time in the event an anomaly in the procedure is discovered at a later date. Carefully verify the results of any mass update to ensure that you get the results you are seeking.

Back to Top