Xailer 8.1: Enhancements on TWebDatasource

Xailer 8.1 will be published in the near future and in a series of short articles we will explain the new features that Xailer 8.1 will incorporate, leaving the most important ones for last. This is one of them.

The next version of Xailer 8.1 incorporates everything necessary to be able to do without any type of FTP connection. That is, all the classic operations that are carried out by FTP, such as:

  • file upload
  • file download
  • file deletion
  • file renaming
  • directory listing
  • directory creation
  • deletion of directories
  • They are included in the new TWebDataSource class.

Note: The FTP services that TWebDatasource includes are limited to the directory where the PHP module is located and its dependent directories.

The use of the FTP protocol is becoming more complex every day due to the different existing options: secure FTP through digital certificate (FTPS) that can be implicit or explicit, through SSH protocol (SFTP) or non-secure FTP. Unfortunately the support of Microsoft Windows in its WININET library for any type of FTP apart from the non-secure one is null and the most appropriate option to attack this problem would have been to use the CURL library that is available in Harbour, but its use is complicated since it requires installing quite a few DLLs. The other option would be to use CURL by command line, which has been available in Windows for a long time, but that means having to ‘launch’ a console program from our application that programmers and users don’t usually like, and neither do antivirus programs.

For all these reasons and an additional one, which is that it is practically impossible for port 80 to be closed (which is the one used by the Web), we have decided to incorporate into our TWebDatasource class all the services that any class of file handling by ftp.

But already put, we have added one more service, which is the possibility of sending emails using one of the most used libraries in PHP, which is PHPMailer. As with the database access credentials to include in the PHP file, the same is true for the credentials for sending mail. In the PHP file itself and under the XA_SendMail() function, in a very simple way and without having to know anything about PHP, you can set all the parameters you want to send emails.

We remind you that this class is only available in the Enterprise version of Xailer.

All the best