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

Accessing data from external applications

Skills Manager is constructed using 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.  SoftVelocity provides a TopSpeed ODBC driver that enables users to access TopSpeed databases using external database query and reporting tools such as Crystal Reports, Microsoft Access, etc.

We regularly recommend "read-only" use of the ODBC driver as a way for customers to access the Skills Manager database when creating customized inquiries and reports with other software applications.  Several of our customers have already developed such applications.

Modifying data from external applications

We caution against use of the ODBC driver to add or modify data contained in the Skills Manager database.  An application of this scale is quite complex.  Extensive editing occurs on all data entered through the application software to guard the integrity of the database, whether it is entered online via entry forms, via scan forms or by importing.

Skills Manager has numerous functions that validate incoming data to preserve the integrity of the database.  These functions involve numeric checks, range checking, date validity checks, checks for the presence of required fields, checks for valid parent/child record relationships, checks to prevent duplicate code and id's, conversion from lower case to upper case characters as needed, and validation of all code values against the values defined in the code tables, and more.  In addition, internal system id's are generated for employees and agencies.  Proper management of these id's is critical to maintain parent/child record relationships.

It would take much knowledge, careful programming, and thorough testing to reproduce these checks in external applications that might be designed to manipulate the Skills Manager database.

Our caution is based on actual experiences.  We have worked with customers in the past who have licensed source code to other applications we have offered with the intent of customizing them and still others who have written their own programs to manipulate databases associated with our products.  Some of these customers did indeed jeopardize the integrity of the database and then claimed that our products were malfunctioning.  Our support staff invested enormous amounts of time investigating their problems before identifying the problem as being caused by the customer.  One such customer even asked us to recover and repair the data they had damaged.

In addition to risk of data integrity, such customers place costly loads on our technical staff.  Being trained on the use of the application and having possession of database specifications simply does not provide enough information for this type of customer.  They request additional information and consultation relating to the architecture of the database, such as use of relationships, indexes, data types and technical specifications with respect to program function.  They sometimes contact our staff to run through "what if" scenarios or ask for advice about the best approach to take when developing external applications.

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 performed on a per incident basis at our technical consultation rate of $150 per hour.

If you choose to proceed with modifying the database, we recommend that you regularly backup your database if this is not already being done.  We also recommend that you keep backups that are recorded (prior to any mass update from an external program) for an extended period of time in the event an anomaly in the procedure is discovered at a later date.

by Steve Wesner

Crown Pointe Technologies, Inc.

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