What does the setting WorkArounds2=8192 do on an ODBC connection?

Question

My company has a 3rd party application that runs on a Progress database. I've been building an application on top of their database using an ODBC connection.

One of the "quirks" of Progress is that it doesn't honor SQL column widths, so it will allow 100 characters in a column defined as a varchar(50). When reading this data via ODBC, I get the following error:

Column test_column in table PUB.test_table has value exceeding its max length or precision.

The support techs at the company that build the application pointed me towards adding some work around flags in the registry for the ODBC connection, however, I can't find any documentation as to what these flags will do or what the possible values are. The registry keys are

KEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->ODBC->ODBC.INI->MyODBCConnectionName->WorkArounds KEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->ODBC->ODBC.INI->MyODBCConnectionName->WorkArounds2

Google has found me other problems that people have solved by adding these flags with specific values (including my personal favourite from The Daily WTF) but I can't find anywhere that tells me what the flags actually do. Do you know?

Answer 1

The link from @tom-bascom no longer works because Progress moved their KB. the comment from @stefan-moser on @mdb's question is appropriate.

According to Chapter 11 WorkAround Options of the DataDirect Connect Series for ODBC Reference

WorkArounds2=8192. Enabling this option causes Microsoft Access not to pass the error -7748. Microsoft Access only asks for data as a two-byte SQL_C_WCHAR, which is an insufficient buffer size to store the UCS2 character and the null terminator; thus, the driver returns a warning, "01004 Data truncated" and returns a null character to Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access then passes error -7748.

references:

• ODBC PRODUCT DOCUMENTATION
• DataDirect Connect Series for ODBC Reference
• http://media.datadirect.com/download/docs/odbc/allodbc/reference/workarounds.html

Answer 2

It is a fix for:

'This error occurs with Microsoft Access 2000 when using the Connect for ODBC drivers to link to a table which has one or more indexes associated with it.'

DataDirect Support KB

Answer 3

The README file for DataDirect Connect for ODBC (a Unix-based ODBC driver) contains a list of workarounds in the "Driver WorkAround Options" section of the document.