Once you have successfully installed AcuODBC on your computer, you must create a data source name (DSN) for every group of Vision or relative files that your Windows application needs to access. In order to complete this step, you must choose a directory where "data dictionary" files are stored. These are described in Section 7.1.
The DSN you establish is arbitrary. You should assign a meaningful name that represents the type of data that the files contain, or the type of query that will be made against the files. When users try to access the data files, they will be asked to specify the DSN. How they are asked depends on the application itself.
As discussed in Chapter 2, the data source is one of the main components of an ODBC installation. Physically, data sources consist of sets of data and their associated environments. This means that the term "data source" actually indicates the data files, the operating system, the file system or DBMS used to manage the physical data, and the optional network software used to access this data. The term data source name (DSN), therefore, refers to something rather complicated.
Because part of the ODBC mission is to hide the complexity of underlying software, ODBC architects have chosen to use an abstract name to identify all the components of a data source. This data source name maps all the underlying software components necessary to access the data.
"This section describes how to create data source names (or DSNs) for your COBOL data files. To create a DSN, you must add the data source name to the ODBC Data Source Administrator in the Windows control panel. The ODBC Data Source Administrator, included as part of your operating system, is your interface for adding, removing, or configuring ODBC data sources on your system. During installation, AcuODBC checks the version of the ODBC Data Administrator included on your system and updates the version if necessary. After you establish your data source name using the ODBC Data Source Administrator, AcuODBC automatically modifies its configuration files to reflect the parameters you entered.
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