Valentina for Xojo/REALbasic FAQ

Please read Valentina for Xojo/REALbasic Installation.

Please read Valentina for Xojo/REALbasic Installation.

Yes, you can use Valentina DB ADK and Valentina Reports ADK with a Standard Edition of Xojo/REALbasic, if you disable RBDB API dependency.

Please read HOW TO here: Valentina for Xojo/REALbasic Installation.

Yes. Please realize that V4RB.rbx plugin is router to few major “Valentina products”: Valentina Local DB Engine, Valentina Local Report Engine, Valentina Client.

You can use only one of these products, as well as all of them. In your final application is ready for deployment you can skip not used Valentina DLLs.

You can write the following code, which allows you to handle Valentina exceptions separately from any other exceptions:

SomeFunction()
   ...
 
Exception err as VException
   MsgBox "Valentina throw exception: " + Str(err.ErrorNumber) + ":" + err.Message
 
Exception err
    MsgBox "Error!"
end

Class VException is a child of Exception class of Xojo. This means that you can also write code as in the next example and still catch Valentina exceptions.

SomeFunction()
   ...
 
Exception err
    MsgBox "Error!"
end

Recently we discovered that the Xojo project may contain Byte Order Mark in the source code. When BOM is inside the query text, database engines (SQLite, Valentina DB) are unable to execute this query, showing errors, not so easy to understand (BOM is invisible in error messages and logs, we can see it only in HEX form).

According to the user report, this problem appeared after the copy/paste operation.

Different APIs are affected - V4RB, REST.

Here's how a BOM can be found:

• In the HEX-editor. When you open such a project, you can see UTF8 BOM (EF BB BF) inside the quoted string.

• In the Xojo IDE. When debugging, check the memory of such a string - UTF8 BOM is in it.

It is not easy to fix it on the database engine side, as it will require to search for BOMs in all strings, so it would be better if Xojo could erase them once after opening.

Currently, there are a few ways to fix this project:

• Using Xojo (recommended by Xojo support)

1: Highlight the text (possibly the entire method)
2: Open the code editor context-menu (normally a right-click with the mouse)
3: Select "Clean invisible ascii characters"

That way, invisible characters are replaced with another character, by default it is '•' (not removed). And then we have to use find/replace to remove them all.

• Open the project in the HEX-editor and remove BOM manually
• Remove BOMs using Xojo code, for example, for iOS app:

inQuery.ReplaceAll( Text.FromUnicodeCodepoint(&hFEFF ), "" )

Ed Kleban suggests:

I'd like to recommend a great little tool I discovered that you can use to easily hide your Valentina (or any other) serial number so others can't easily obtain it by scanning your compiled source code:

http://www.truenorthsoftware.com/Realbasic/Obfuscate.html

Obfuscate (version 1.1)

Obfuscate is a program to render obscure a string of text within Xojo compiled code. Anyone scanning your code with a hex editor will not be able to pick out what you are trying to hide in the code without a lot of work. Use Obfuscate for serial numbers and other key information.

System Requirements:

  Mac OS X 10.2 or later
  Windows 2000/XP or later

Price: Obfuscate is free. Enjoy!

1) - It`s historically. There was a time when REALbasic did not have Variant. 2) When Variant was added, we have seen it is very slow. x100 times slower than working with strings. So we have left so far both versions.

Yes, there is the difference. In the first case works VField.value as VARIANT, In the second case works VLong.value as integer. The second case is much faster, at least for RB 5.5 - 2006.

You should use the “self” keyword of Xojo to get the reference to the current Table.

You can use method VField.SetBlank().
Also you can use property VField.IsNull = true.

Probably in the debug mode you have Valentina.DebugLevel = kLogParams. This mode can be slower because it produces debug log on HDD.

Yes, you can. Please read details here. But most developers prefer native Valentina API, because it is more powerful and flexible.

Yes, thanks to “bridge”. Check VDatabase( VRBDatabase ) constructor.

Please read instructions for each OS in the section Deployment.

V4RB.rbx plugin itself contains internally 3 DLLs for each OS. So on the first step - yes, you can. But you will need to do yet special “prepare for deployment steps” as described in the section Deployment.

There are few reasons. 1) One of them is the size of that archive, because Valentina is a set of few products, and contains several additional DLLs. 2) We believe that you anyway should have access to other OS, at least as virtual machines, because you should do testing of compile application.