Assume the goal is to take advantage of the new feature introduced with v12.1 that being to take advantage of an external database. The restriction is that an external database can only be accessed via 4D SQL.

To populate this database the SQL command INSERT INTO will have to be used. The fast way to do this is to load up arrays and include these arrays in the VALUES clause of the SQL statement. Consider the example code below:

ARRAY LONGINT($ID_aL;0) ARRAY TEXT($Name_aT;0) ARRAY TEXT($Addr_aT;0) ARRAY TEXT($User_aT;0) ARRAY TEXT($Pass_aT;0) ARRAY DATE($Date_aD;0) ARRAY LONGINT($Time_aL;0) ALL RECORDS([MyTable]) SELECTION TO ARRAY([MyTable]ID;$ID_aL\     ;[MyTable]Name;$Name_aT\     ;[MyTable]Address;$Addr_aT\     ;[MyTable]UserName;$User_aT\     ;[MyTable]Password;$Pass_aT\     ;[MyTable]JoinDate;$Date_aD\     ;[MyTable]JoinTime;$Time_aL) $SOA:=Size of array($ID_aL) ARRAY TEXT($Time_aT;$SOA) For ($Ndx;1;$SOA)     $Time_aT{$Ndx}:=Time string($Time_aL{$Ndx}) End for Begin SQL    USE DATABASE DATAFILE :$ExtDB_Path_T;    INSERT INTO MyTable ( ID, Name, Address,       UserName, Password, Res_Date, Res_Time )    VALUES (:$ID_aL, :$Name_aT, :$Addr_aT,        :$User_aT, :$Pass_aT, :$Date_aD, :$Time_aT );    USE DATABASE SQL_INTERNAL; End SQL

On the surface this is quite simple and fairly straight forward. The hurdle in this exercise is the time field "JoinTime." Using SELECTION TO ARRAY the values of this field are, as usual, captured into a longint array. But herein is the issue; 4D SQL does not directly translate a longint array into a time value.

The solution to the issue is to convert the longint values in $Time_aL into string using in text array $Time_aT using the command TIME STRING. TIME STRING produces a string in the format of HHJ:MM:SS. 4D SQL has no problem converting strings in this format into time values in the INSERT INTO statement.