DirList2ODBC - Configuring a DSN

To open the ODBC Driver Manager, you must first open up your system's Control Panel by clicking on the Start menu, selecting Settings, and clicking on Control Panel:

Once you are in the Control Panel, double-click on ODBC Data Sources or 32-bit ODBC, whichever appears in your Control Panel:

Once you are in the ODBC Driver Manager's Control Panel, click on System DSN:

You are now ready to add a DSN for DirList2ODBC. Click on the Add... button in the above window and then select DirList2 ODBC Driver when the following window appears:

Click on Finish. You are now ready to set up your DSN. When you have finished setting that up, return to this guide to set up connection pooling.

Click on the Connection Pooling tab to bring up that configuration:

Double-click on DirList2 ODBC. The following window will appear:

Ensure that Pool Connections to this driver is selected. Connection pooling can enhance ODBC performance when connections are rapidly established and ended, such as when using it inside of a web site script. This setting has no performance enhancement when working with Microsoft Access as it establishes only one connection and keeps it throughout the session.

Congratulations! You are now ready to use your DirList2 system :-)!

DirList2ODBC DSN Setup

This dialog allows you to configure your data source parameters.

Data Source Name - Type in the name that you want to use for this data source in this field. When you connect to the database, this is the name that you will need to use as the DSN parameter.
Description - This field is not used by the driver, and it can be any value that you want it to be.
Index - This tells the DirList2 server what index file to work with.
Login - Type in the default username to login as when prompted for a login.
Password - Type in the default password to use when prompted for a password.
Server - The hostname or TCP/IP address to connect to when using this data source. This is usually www.yourdomain.com, or whatever web server you are running DirList2 Server on.
Port - The TCP/IP port on the server to connect to. In most cases, this is 80, which is the standard TCP/IP port for web servers.
Path - The absolute path of the dirlist2.cgi program. Note that because this is an absolute path, you must begin the path with a slash /. This parameter is usually just /cgi-bin/dirlist2.cgi
Use CHAR for text-based primary keys - When enabled, the ODBC driver will claim that the data type for string-based primary keys are CHAR instead of LONG VARCHAR, the native string type in the server. This is required for Microsoft Access to accept string-based primary keys as primary keys.
Use CHAR for all text-based data - When enabled, the ODBC driver will claim that all string-based fields are CHAR instead of LONG VARCHAR. This can be useful for ODBC clients that do not support LONG VARCHAR data at all. For Microsoft Access, enabling this option will allow you to sort recordsets by string variables without having to use the ORDER BY clause.
Length of CHAR data - This is the length of the CHAR fields that the ODBC driver will report to ODBC clients if they ask. The upper limit of this field that most ODBC clients expect is 255, though the driver does not prevent you from specifying greater lengths. The server's native string type is LONG VARCHAR, and strings in the server have no practical limit other than 2^32-1 characters. Microsoft Access apparently does not read this field from this driver, and this might be investigated sometime in the future if needed.
Include uninitialized extended data - When checked, the driver returns all possible extended data types for all users when querying tblClassData regardless of whether or not the class data values are actually set.

Copyright (c) 2000 Steven Lawrance
Copyright (c) 1999-2000 Bryant College
Written by Steven Lawrance
DirList2 Server Version: 2.6
DirList2ODBC Version: 1.51
Last Revision: 10-08-2000