ODBC, PHP and a lack of understanding.

[evilbreadbin]

Greetings,

My problem consists of two parts, the first of which I imagine is only
a matter of syntax whilst the second might very well be impossible.

I'm not sure if it is of consequence but PHP is running on a Win2000
machine and the ODBC connection in question links to an MS-Access
database.

1/ I am trying to get my head around odbc_columns(). When using the
function in its simple case -- just providing a ODBC link -- all is
fine and it returns a dataset of all the columns in all the tables
fine. The problem is that I cannot ask it to list _all_ the columns
each time and I would like to be able to inspect just one table's
columns. (A major reason for this is that the target database
contains hundreds of tables and so odbc_columns() takes a long time to
complete.)

Trouble is I don't posses enough knowledge of DB systems to understand
what is meant by the qualifier and schema parameters, anyone had any
success in this area?

2/ I grant that this doesn't seem to have a solution but I thought
I'd ask just in case... basically I'm looking for an equivalent of
mysql_field_table() but for ODBC. Either that or some way of
determining the source table of a given field from a resultset or even
the original SQL statement.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--Phil

[evilbreadbin]

ph**@openaccess.tv (evilbreadbin) wrote in message news:<a9**************************@posting.google. com>...

Greetings,

My problem consists of two parts, the first of which I imagine is only
a matter of syntax whilst the second might very well be impossible.

I'm not sure if it is of consequence but PHP is running on a Win2000
machine and the ODBC connection in question links to an MS-Access
database.

1/ I am trying to get my head around odbc_columns(). When using the
function in its simple case -- just providing a ODBC link -- all is
fine and it returns a dataset of all the columns in all the tables
fine. The problem is that I cannot ask it to list _all_ the columns
each time and I would like to be able to inspect just one table's
columns. (A major reason for this is that the target database
contains hundreds of tables and so odbc_columns() takes a long time to
complete.)

Trouble is I don't posses enough knowledge of DB systems to understand
what is meant by the qualifier and schema parameters, anyone had any
success in this area?

2/ I grant that this doesn't seem to have a solution but I thought
I'd ask just in case... basically I'm looking for an equivalent of
mysql_field_table() but for ODBC. Either that or some way of
determining the source table of a given field from a resultset or even
the original SQL statement.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--Phil

For anybody having similar problems I have now managed to get the
first part of this working. Here is a working example:

<?php
$conn_ODBC = odbc_connect("peopledb", "Admin", "") or die;
$result = odbc_columns($conn_ODBC, "peopledb", "", "people");
odbc_result_all($result);
?>

Where the second param of odbc_columns() is the DNS ODBC link, the
third a zero length string and the forth the table name.

Still don't have a solution to the second part, I'm thinking of doing
a simplistic SQL parser to pull the information directly from the SQL
Statement -- clearly not a preferred solution but it is the only one I
see. Therefore I'd be grateful for any other advice on the matter.

--Phil