General

heitml accesses the database using the 32-bit ODBC drivers. Many database systems are actually delivered together with 32-bit ODBC drivers, e.g. Microsoft Access^TM version 95, 97, 2000 or XP.

How to get ODBC 32-bit drivers?

At the time of this writing, ODBC 32-bit Drivers are shipped either

1. with Windows Me, Windows 2000 or Windows XP,
2. with the latest Microsoft OfficeTM distribution,
3. with the appropriate Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) distribution,
4. or with the latest MERANT DataDirect distribution.

MDAC can be downloaded for free from http://www.microsoft.com/data.

Creating Data Sources

To access a database from heitml you must create a data source. The data source must have a unique name. This name has to be specified through the datasource parameter in the heitml configuration file. The data source for the demo application is named "heitml2.1". To create it and to link it to the file \htdocs\heitml2.1\tutor\heitml.mdb in the heitml installation directory perform the following steps:

• Click on Start, then Settings, then Control Panel. On Windows 2000 and Windows XP, click the Administrative Tools icon in Control Panel.
• In the Control Panel, find the '32-bit ODBC', 'ODBC Data Sources' or 'Data Sources (ODBC)' icon and double-click on it.
• In the 'ODBC Data Source Administrator' window, click the 'System DSN' tab.
• Now click on the 'Add' button.
• Click on the entry 'Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)' or the entry with the driver of your favorite database system to highlight it and then click 'Finish'.
• In the window coming up, enter "heitml2.1" as the Data Source Name and provide further database specific information. In the case you selected the MS Access^TM ODBC Driver:
  1. Click the 'Select' button
  2. In the Select Database window, first select the Drive where you installed heitml and then select the 'heitml2.1' directory folder (If you installed heitml under a folder other than the default name 'heitml2.1', choose that folder instead.) Look for the file in the \htdocs\heitml2.1\tutor directory called heitml.mdb and click on it to highlight it. Then click OK, which closes the 'Select Database' window.
  3. In the 'ODBC Microsoft Access Setup' window click OK to close it.
• In the 'ODBC Data Source Administrator' window click OK to close it.

If your database system requires user authentication (like MS SQL Server^TM), setup a user 'heitml' with password 'heitml' for the database you are going to access through the ODBC data source "heitml2.1" and grant appropriate permissions.

Thread-safe ODBC 32-bit drivers

In a multi-threaded application like an ISAPI compliant Web server, the ODBC driver must be thread-safe. At the time of this writing, all ODBC drivers based on the Microsoft Jet database engine like the Microsoft Access^TM driver are not thread-safe, the Microsoft SQL Server^TM, Oracle and Visual FoxPro ODBC drivers are thread-safe. For more information, see the dbserialize configuration option.