Symptom
An popup error is shown: “ERROR: could not load Pervasive Extended DataType Conversion library (pedtconv). Please contact support before continuing to use the application.”
Cause
Btrieve supports a good number of data types natively; however, there are many more used by the different programming languages that can utilize Btrieve. For instance, Btrieve supports dates by using a four byte binary structure with year, month and day. Many applications store dates as a string or as a Julian value.
By default, these values would be defined in the DDF (Pervasive.SQL Schema) as just a string or a number. Migrating this information to SQL as defined is okay; but what if you want to write a SQL query comparing two such fields. Comparing a string date (“10-10-2009”) to a number (19354839) just isn’t going to produce a desirable result. It would be much better if both used a real date data type.
Resolution
Pervasive introduced an extra DDF long ago called FieldExt.ddf which allows further definition of almost 30 more types. To read these types, Pervasive has a library called the Pervasive Extended Data Type Conversion Library which lives in the PEDTCONV dll found in their Active-X SDK. This can be downloaded from the Pervasive Developer Center: http://www.pervasive.com/developerzone/sdk/. When installing the SDK, be sure to install the Redistributable files.
Once you have the pedtconv.dll file, copy it into the application directory where the Mertech w3btrv7/w3btrv7 dll lives.