BMC Remedy AR System ODBC considerations

Consider these issues when working with BMC Remedy AR System ODBC:

• The BMC Remedy AR System ODBC driver is read-only. ODBC clients that create, modify, or delete entries or tables do not function correctly with the AR System driver.
• The BMC Remedy AR System ODBC presents BMC Remedy AR System join forms as a single table, enabling you to search AR System join forms easily. However, in third-party ODBC clients, such as Crystal Reports, you cannot run an SQL search that performs a join directly through the SQL statement.
  If you cannot create a BMC Remedy AR System join form for the data you need, it is possible to create multiple BMC Remedy AR System data sources, connect to one AR System table per data source, and then perform the join in your ODBC client.
• Hidden form permissions are not enforced in the ODBC driver. Forms that are hidden from the Mid Tier Object List are accessible for reporting to other tools using the BMC Remedy ODBC driver.
• If you use the BMC Remedy AR System ODBC Driver in MS Access to link tables, you might encounter the following error: Cannot define field more than once. As a workaround, select the Use Underscores during the DSN configuration. This option makes form and field names adhere to SQL standards by removing spaces and other nonstandard characters.
  To determine which fields are in conflict, you can enable ODBC Tracing and look through the logs, or you can navigate through the Fields list in Developer Studio to see if there are fields that meet the preceding conditions.
• When the ODBC driver accesses a currency field, it generates four or more column names for the field by adding suffixes to the field name. The suffixes are:
  • _Date
  • _Type
  • _Value
  • _functional_currency_code
    The driver creates one column for each functional currency code defined for the field.
    If the form contains a field with a name that is the same as one of the generated names, the ODBC driver will report "Cannot define field more than once" and fail to get the data.
    To prevent this problem, do not use field names that conflict with the column names generated by the ODBC driver for currency fields.