Re: [INTERFACES] Re: M$-Access'97 and TIMESTAMPs

Hi,

After some testing with the ROWVER stuff, I have come up with the
following and wanted to see what people thought about it:

What I have now is if you have a timestamp type column and its field
name is "timestamp", the driver will report it as a ROWVER column in
SQLSpecialColumns. This causes Access to use it as a versioning
column. Does this seem too restrictive? Do you have other ideas of
what should constitute a versioning column? I think the field name
should be agreed upon and fixed in the driver, don't you? The other
caveat about this method is that you would have to supply a trigger to
update this 'timestamp' field on INSERT and UPDATE.

One of the things I can't get around in Access is using a column in
SQLSpecialColumns that does not appear in SQLColumns (i.e., a
pseudo-column). For example, even if we had a 'tmin' column (I know it
was removed for 6.3.2), or wanted to try using the 'xmin' column, we
couldn't use it as a pseudo column. We would have to display the
column. Access spits out an ugly message when I try to use a
pseudo-column ("Table TMP%#MAU@ already exists").

I have tested other types besides timestamps, like int4, and they seem
to work fine as a versioning column. So, we could use the postgres
'xmin' column, if we displayed it in SQLColumns. It seems to always
update so you wouldn't have to worry about a trigger. I'm not sure what
end-users would think about seeing these ugly columns in Access? Any
thoughts about that?

Please give me some feedback on this.

Byron