How to integrate Visual FoxPro w/ MySQL for eCommerce website?

Question

Hi all,

I'm working on an eCommerce website for a small merchant. This merchant uses Opera (which is based on Visual FoxPro) to manage his in-store inventory, and would like the online store inventory to reflect the in-store inventory.

I'm guessing that my first step is to set up a way to regularly transfer the information from the VFP database to a MySQL database on the website's server. Is there an established process for this? Am I even approaching this problem from the right angle? I've heard a lot about ODBC, but am unsure as to how to implement it or if it's what I'm looking for in this situation.

If it wasn't obvious by this point, I'm in over my head here, and would appreciate any and all advice you may have, including links to articles or tutorials that can help improve my general understanding of all the moving parts here.

Thanks much.

Answer 1

Co-worker developed synchronization process between VFP and MSSQL2008. WCF service which took input directly from VFP.

On other project - as far as i remember, when we tried ODBC .NET data adapter, it had problems with encodings and foreign languages. That's why we used COM+, serialization for communication with .NET.

But it seems to me you are using PHP (eCommerce=>Drupal=>PHP) so you are in completely different situation.

In your case, i would start with checking out if Opera (i guess it's this Opera) provides built-in export and eCommerce provides built-in import. Mostly because it might be tedious work to sync data manually from 2 apps coded by someone else. Then i would research if i/o can be joined and automated (something like scheduled task on win environment). Unfortunately, can't help much more because i'm unfamiliar with those tools, products and technologies.

Anyway - it seems to me like quite hard and dirty task and i wish you good luck. :)

Answer 2

Depend on what is that you are using to implement the website.. in general it is pretty easy with ODBC (In Java , I did it using the jdbc-odbc bridge)