Defining Internet pathnames

In both standard client/server and Internet configurations, enabling your applications to use AcuServer requires that your applications refer to remote files with remote name notation.

The easiest way to enable your applications to use AcuServer is to update the FILE_PREFIX and CODE_PREFIX runtime configuration variables to include paths with remote name notation. This holds true whether the remote path is a standard remote server address or an Internet address.

To add a remote search path, you simply append or insert the name and path of the remote directory to the variable's definition. For Internet configurations, you include the domain name of the AcuServer server that users are accessing over the Internet. For example, if the name of the server is "condor," you could define the configuration variables as follows:

FILE_PREFIX   @condor.XYZCorp.com:/usr/data
CODE_PREFIX   @condor.XYZCorp.com:/usr/objects

Of course, you could define "condor" as an alias for condor.XYZCorp.com, and simplify the remote name notation in these variables to "@condor:/usr/data" and "@condor:/usr/objects". This would not include the port number, but the port number is not always required.

If you want to enter the explicit IP address of the server, you may do so as shown in the following example:

FILE_PREFIX @128.110.121.42:/usr/data
CODE_PREFIX @128.110.121.42:/usr/objects

Alternatively, for highest performance, you can map the Vision filename directly to the Internet pathname by defining a file name alias in your runtime configuration file. A file name alias is a substitute string for the literal name that appears in the ASSIGN TO clause of a SELECT statement. Defining the alias shown below allows you to bypass FILE-PREFIX for "customer.dat":

CUSTOMER @condor.XYZCorp.com:/usr/data/customer.dat 

By not requiring the runtime to connect to the server to see whether a file exists, you can open the file more quickly. For information on using name aliases, see Using Name Aliases.