What is ADOxtra?

ADOxtra is an extension of Macromedia Director of type 'scripting xtra'. It extends the capabilities of Lingo (Director's scripting language) with ability to access databases using ADO.
 ADOxtra allows you to retrieve or modify data in MS Access files, MS SQL Server and Oracle databases, ODBC compliant databases from authoring or projector locally and over LAN or from Shockwave. It is capable to access databases over Internet.
ADOxtra provides recordset-based data accessing with automatic type casting that grants the ability to work with a database field value of that type that it is in a database. So integer database fields look like integer Lingo values and text database fields look like string Lingo values, etc. You do not need to explicitly convert values.

What is ADO?

ADO (Active Data Objects) component is one of Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC).
MDAC is a modern system level extension from Microsoft providing database management capabilities. It is already installed with Windows 98/ME/2000, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and other software.
It is already present on the most of user systems.
Installers for Windows 95/NT systems are available online at www.microsoft.com.
The complete ADO documentation is available online at msdn.microsoft.com.
Also see http://www.microsoft.com/data/ for more information about MDAC.

ADO object model

ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) are a set of objects that provides the high level interface to OLE DB database providers. Database providers may perform actual database accessing or may serve as lower level interface to other databasing components. MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components) contain several OLE DB providers for Access, MS SQL, Oracle, ODBC and several others. Also MDAC contain Microsoft Remoting provider. It is used to provide remote (over Internet) connection to the database. MS Remote provider is used on the client side and one of the other providers is used on the server side.

So, the one of the basic points of using ADO is specifying correct connection parameters which have to define the provider, the data source and other information specific to the provider. ADO provides the Connection object that is responsible for the establishing connection to some provider. Also Connection object is responsible for the general connection operations like transactions management.

One of the most important objects, which ADO consists of, is the Recordset object. Recordset object serves as an interface to the actual database data. Recordset can access the data one record at a time. The current record is represented via collection of Field objects, where each Field object corresponds to the field of a table or data query. Recordset object provides browsing capabilities to move through the set of records. Some of Recordset's capabilities depends on the provider, others depends on the settings of certain properties.

In general, there are several ways how to get connected to the database. The simple scenario includes creating a recordset object, invoking Recordset's Open method with parameters providing minimum amount of information. The advanced scenario usually includes more steps: creating connection object, specifying multiple connection options, opening connection, creating recordset object, binding recordset to the opened connection, adjusting recordset properties and opening recordset. In most cases it is enough to use simple scenario since the default ADO behavior is often just what you need.