O$: read non-unicode Datafile in O$ 5.2

[Kelly Burgess]

Hi Nick,

>looking for a way to read data from a non-unicode Datafile in Omnis Studio 5.2 . . . without converting the Datafile
>We're thinking along the lines of setting up an O$ 4.3 Library to pass the data to the O$ 5.2 Library.
>Does anyone have any experience with this?

We're doing essentially that in TheRecipeManager, where our cookbook/recipe sharing mechanism allows two Omnis apps to query each other (and our Objective-C app running on iOS devices) for lists of cookbooks or a list of a cookbook's recipes to browse, and then send requests to fetch recipes, each of which is composed of several related records.  We use my TCPTalk external and Bonjour networking to advertise and to discover other advertised services, but essentially one app ends up listening on a known or discovered IP port for requests from the other app, and using whatever vocabulary you devise, it would decode requests, access the datafile, and return the data in some agreed-on format.  TCPTalk has utility commands to flatten record lists into an encoded stream for transmitting, and to recover the flattened data into lists again on the receiving end.  Without it, you can just roll your own scheme for structuring your response data.

At this point we haven't released a unicode version.  When we do, we'll need to do some extra work to convert to and from UTF-8 as required, and avoid transmitting unicode character data at 4 times the size.

Kelly