Programmatic access of SQLite/Ultra Recall database

[aaronjsolomon]

Hi,

Huge fan of UR, use it all day every day.

I've been doing a fair amount of manipulating UR databases using VBScript and the specially-compiled sqlite3.exe you provide elsewhere in this forum. (IIRC, Kinook made a minor change to the .urd file format so that other products would not recognize it as a SQLite file.)

However, it would be a real boon to be able to use more robust programming tools such as ADO.NET wrappers, ODBC drivers, etc.

RazorSQL is a great RDBMS because it performs all of its functions via the command-line tool, which gives me an opportunity to point to your custom sqlite3.exe.

However, in a scripting/programming environment, I haven't been able to figure out how to access a UR database directly, other than by constructing query strings and passing them to the command-line shell (and even this limited functionality is very useful!). This works reasonably well for simple updates and deletes, but provides no means (AFAIK) to load a result set into memory and iterate/manipulate results via code.

Question: please advise on how one might programmatically connect to a UR database via COM, .NET, ODBC, or the like. One obvious approach would be to tweak UR itself so that it can access .urd files that internally conform to the SQLite file spec, in addition to Ultra Recall's slightly tweaked version. (I'm not looking for a file conversion tool, I can figure that out myself. Just a registry entry that allows a standard SQLite file to be opened and accessed.) This approach seems ideal because I could then access the full set of SQLite tools that are out there, many of which are limited and/or costly.

Alternatively, please advise if there are other paths to this same end. There are supposedly some open source SQLite connectors where I might be able to tweak them to read .urd files, but I'm not an alpha programmer (hence VBScript), and many SQLite dev projects are dormant/flaky, so I'm reluctant to burn time on that path unless absolutely necessary.

Eagerly looking forward to your thoughts!

Cheers, Aaron

[kinook]

Currently, in order to access the .urd file from other SQLite tools, you would need to modify the .urd file in a binary file editor and change the first 15 bytes from

Ultra Recall DB

to

SQLite format 3

and then change it back to open again in Ultra Recall.

We'll look into modifying UR to support opening .urd files with either beginning signature.

[aaronjsolomon]

OK, thanks.

The scripts I'm creating require UR to be running at least part of the time (e.g. to sync items to Outlook), so it would be great to be able to programmatically query the database while UR is running. So, allowing UR to open files with the SQLite format string would be insanely cool.

Thanks again for the quick response. I'll hold my breath until UR natively supports the SQLite signature

Cheers, Aaron

[kinook]

Implemented in v5.2.0.9.

http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?t=5344

[aaronjsolomon]

AWESOME!!!!!!!!!

Thanks!