Hello all. I have an application built in visual basic 6.0 that uses qodbc to interact with quickbooks and i have 2 problems.

1. How will i know whether quickbooks is currently running or not because it seems the connectionstring takes one kind of parameters if its running and another when its not. e.g. one has to specify name of the company file if quickbooks is not running and you can simply give the dsn in connectionstring if qb is running. besides how can i authenticate user before connection to qb via qodbc.

2. secondly i want to create a setup using windows installer that delivers .msi files. But i cannot figure out how to include this qodbc driver into my setup. 

Thanks in advance

When you first connect to any company file you will need to go through the authentication process. So you will need to the tell the end user to launch QuickBooks and open the company file for you. So you would use:

DFQ=.

where . means current company file open in QuickBooks. Once you know the full path of the company file you would change it to the path of the company file, for example:

DFQ=C:\QBOOKS\DW.QBW

So you can simply swap the connection string until you have a successful connection. You can also do a:

SELECT CompanyName FROM Company

to check you're working with the right company file.... just in case the user has a different company file open.

In regards to installing QODBC, see: Quiet install and selecting Region for further information.