How to create new FireDac components

[CoeurdeLeon 7]

The US Veterans Affairs Medical Health Record system uses a database called Vista which is a FileMan/Mumps/M based DBMS.  It is old.  It is very fast.  It is huge!!!  Many arrogant vendors have tried to move this data to a MODERN DBMS system.  Most have failed.  The Medical Health Record System at VA is written in Delphi.  It is called "CPRSChart".  It is used my millions of users daily.  The connections between the Delphi front end and the Vista backend are very complicated and arcane.  

 

Is there an open source framework for developing new FireDac connectors?

 

I have not found any.

 

I would like to develop a FileMan FireDac connector so that CPRSChart could communicate directly with the Vista database.

 

How would you recommend that I proceed.

 

Thank you.

Dick Maley

[Brian Evans 83]

The higher editions of Delphi include source for the various FireDac adapters/drivers. Most are for SQL databases of some form. Not sure how easy it would be to match up with FileMan/Mumps/M which is not relational and doesn't always include enough metadata for a driver to figure things out without more help.

 

A third-party developer (CDATA) made a lot of FireDac connectors for various things (https://www.cdata.com/firedac/) but nothing for FileMan/Mumps/M. That hints it may not be a small project. 

 

[Uwe Raabe 1891]

As a side note: For quite some time one can find some NexusDB related files in the FireDAC sources, albeit we are waiting for a working NexusDB link since about a similar time frame. Seems it is far from trivial to implement that.

[MarkShark 26]

Blast from the past!  I worked at the Lab of Computer Science at Mass General Hospital right out of College (a great place with wonderful people.)  I worked on Mumps for a few years back then.  The database for Mumps/M is a hieratical database and it's not easy to do a direct translation to a relational database (based on knowledge from 30 years ago so it might be completely out of date! lol)  In any case, I might look at Zeoslib instead of Firedac since it's open source and might be easier to create a new driver with.  Sorry to not be more helpful!