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August 03, 2005
ClientDataSet and nested data sets, and general Delphi bling
TClientDataSet is a wrapper for a minimal portable database implementation known as MIDAS. Client data sets allow you to populate them with fields and data from other databases, or you can create your own schema at design or runtime. Data can be streamed into a proprietary binary file format (.CDS) or XML (although the XML schema is proprietary). What's really cool is that fields in a client data set can themselves be data sets, allowing master-detail relationships to be created relatively easily. I stress the relatively, because it isn't entirely clear from the Delphi documentation how to do it. Which is why people like Cary Jensen, Marco Cantu, Ray Konopka, Bob Swart, Charlie Calvert, Steve Teixeira (recently defected to MS, boo hiss!), Xavier Pacheco and all those TeamB people and other Delphi experts who post their knowledge where all and sundry can find it deserve medals. Cary Jensen is singled out in this post for his excellent and comprehensive article on nested data sets using TClientDataSet.
Posted by daen at August 3, 2005 03:29 AM