MS Remote Data Service can currently be used with Forest & Trees as a method of querying databases over a network. MS Internet Information Server has to be installed on a Windows NT or 2000 server, and F&T can then query any datasource that is available on that server. For added functionality within F&T, the F&T business objects can be installed on the server so that F&T can obtain a list of datasources, tables and columns that are available.
What if there is no IIS available on a remote server but you have the F&T business objects (F&T RDS components from F&T install disk), how could you access remote data that is available on the server?
Instead of using Remote Data Service (RDS) via IIS to query remote data sources over an intranet/internet, it is possible to use the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) as an alternative method of communication. DCOM is that part of the Component Object Model (COM) implementation that allows COM components to communicate over a network.
The Forest & Trees RDS business objects can be packaged to look and behave as COM objects and can then be used like any other COM object locally or across a network via DCOM. Here follows a step-by-step guide to getting a server to work with DCOM instead of IIS and then accessing the data using the RDS Interface in F&T.
Steps required on the server:
Steps required on the F&T client machine:
The setup is now complete, and the RDS interface can now be used to access datasources on the server, except on the server the method used to transport the data is DCOM and not IIS. The only difference that the F&T user sees on the client is the necessity to use a username and password, and there is no protocol required when specifying the hostname.
The benefit of this is that there is no need to have an IIS server, the inbuilt COM functionality of Windows can be utilised at no extra cost.