In Update Data with ProDataSets, we introduced you to all the syntax to support logging changes and applying them to the database. Some of that work was more complicated than it would normally need to be because we needed to show you all the attributes and methods that are available to you when you need to do something very specific in your application. However, the high-level methods such as GET-CHANGES, SAVE-ROW-CHANGES, and MERGE-CHANGES can do all the work of each major step in the process in many (perhaps most) cases, which removes the burden of having to pay strict attention to what obscure supporting attributes like ORIGIN-HANDLE and BEFORE-ROWID do. As we explained in Update Data with ProDataSets, those attributes and methods are there so that you can do everything that the higher-level methods do when they do not provide exactly what you need.

In this set of topics, we will show you how to simplify the update process even further, providing a simple dynamic procedure for the client side and for the server side of an application that can collect and apply changes for any ProDataSet, using its handle and the attributes that let you inspect its structure.