Need to build web service, pronto :)

[herbstgy]

Dear All,

I have a VFP9 win32 app which works quite fine for years now. But now I'm in a situation that I have to let go the thick client and put at least some of the functions into a web page. The trouble is, I never did anything similar earlier.
So I just started to view the VFP samples about the subject and found this foxisapi.dll.
I have an IIS 10.0 that I can use here, I've put the foxisapi.dll into the c:\inetpub\scripts directory as the help directed me, then I tried to run the foxis project.
It has a proper test.htm page, which looks similar like the form in the project.

but when I press one of the buttons on top, I get this message.

I guess I'm missing something fundamental here.
Anyone care to guide me?

 

[Chris Miller]

Isapi extensions are still a feature of IIS on Windows 11. From that perspective it's not outdated.

Building the foxisapi.dll from the C++ source code in \Samples\Servers\Foxisapi\Csource is also not the hard step, because you don't need to and can get it from https://github.com/VFPX/FoxISAPI

It's the configuration step to allow the foxisapi.dll to instanciate the COM Server you build from the Foxis.pjx, as described in the help, which is so outdated it doesn't work that way anymore:

...you need to run the DCOMCNFG utility to configure DCOM to give rights to the IIS service to instantiate OLE objects.

To configure Windows 2000 or later DCOM

1. At the Command prompt, type DCOMCNFG and press Enter.
2. In the Applications tab, select the name of the Automation server. When you build the server, the application is "employee" by default.
3. ...

Starting DCOMCNFG I don't see an Applications tab or the "employee" application, and I did build the foxis project into a DLL and there is a foxis.employee COM class. One glimmer of hope I had was googling turned up configure the IIS application pool you define for the foxis website to enable 32bit Applications should be enough, but it still doesn't work, I get "an unhandled win32 exception occured in w3wp.exe.

 

[Chris Miller]

If I would give the desktop app to them ("part time student workers") in any way, I would have to make serious rewrites so they can only reach the functions intended for them, or develop a separate application

In that situation, why not make a copy of the project and strip out anything not for the part time student workers? That's the simplest way to be sure there's no flaw enabling them to get into features not intended for them.

Sure, it means a light version you'll need to maintain separately, but so is writing a web appllication, so that can't be an argument.

On the other side, introducing a login and permissions on features of an application is not impossible, but clearly removing anything that's not intended for the student workes is simpler to do, isn't it? Or is that so intertwined into the forms, that it's not simple to separate out?