How do I detect if BDE is installed?

[Ronin441]

I have a database app, which must talk to both BDE and Interbase as a backend.

My problem is that I don't know how to tell whether or not BDE is installed on a PC. So, when my app starts on a PC without BDE, it throws an access violation or some equally unuseful error message. It then continues fine down the Interbase path, but I'd really like a way to not have this nasty error pop in front of users.

It's a bit tricky to debug because my development box, of course, has BDE installed.

-- Doug Burbidge mailto:dougburbidge@yahoo.com

http://home.iprimus.com.au/dougburbidge/

 

[richardchaven]

You can test for BDE in a launcher app and, if it is present, call your real application.

One way to test is to explicitly load the BDE DLL (IDAPI32.DLL, I think) using Windows.LoadLibrary.

Cheers