How can I read/write Easy Dental 2010 DAT files?

Question

I have a friend that works at a dental office and they'll like for me to write a data migration tool. They want to export data from old system which stores data in a SQL database into Easy Dental 2010. Along with patient data there are also digital documents (images) they would like to import into the Easy Dental patient records.

I took a look at Easy Dental and it seems possible. Easy Dental seems to use Faircom's C-TreeAce embedded engine though I don't know which version they use. The 2 problems I'm encountering is that

1. I don't know the file/table structure of the Easy Dental files.

2. I don't know how to read & write to these C-TreeAce files.

Any help in getting a jump start on thing would be greatly appreciated.

My expertise are primarily in enterprise web development in Java using rdbms backend such as Oracle.

Answer 1

To connect to those files to read/write and get the db structure, the easiest way would be to connect through ODBC. You can get the ODBC driver by downloading C-Tree express version (download: http://www.faircom.com/ace/download_t.php - setup: http://www.baybreezesoft.com/help/sqledge/faq_ctree.php ).

Then you could easily explore files with any DB tool supporting ODBC connection and, as you are a java developer, then use sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver. However you might still need the credentials to connect to the file database, I hope this is windows auth, or you'll need a bit of reverse engineering (look into files, debug).