The main objective of this document is to provide information to help you install the FDO software and then use it to build applications that connect to and configure providers. “Configure providers” means creating and deleting user accounts, granting and revoking database privileges to users, creating and destroying data stores, and creating and destroying spatial contexts. Not every provider supports configuration. See Command Capabilities.
The RDBMS-based providers with the exception of SQL Server require rdbms client software to be installed and configured in order to make the provider fully functional. This document describes the installation and configuration of these clients. Having a SQL Server client on your machine can be useful so the installation of this client is described as well.
This document identifies the classes and methods you use for connecting to and configuring providers but does not provide details about their use. For more information, see the FDO API reference documentation. Doxygen is used to generate the API reference documentation from comments wrapped in doxygen tags and embedded in the C++ headers.
The FDO Developer’s Guide (FDG_FDODevGuide.pdf) describes additional FDO API customization and development features for FDO applications. The developer’s guide expands on the FDO API introduced in this document, further explains the role of a feature provider, and provides detailed information and examples about how to code your application.