Zinc Crashes on Select from Database

Background

I'm using Zinc 3 as a wrapper around a Flash 9 / ActionScript 3 application for a touch-screen kiosk that requires database and comport access.

Problem

The Zinc application crashes when calling mdm.Database.ADO.getData() to obtain the results of a query (either SELECT or stored procedure) executed by mdm.Database.ADO.select() IF the query produces an empty result set. I'm connecting to a MS SQL Server 2005 database, but this issue probably happens with any ADO connection.

Example

mdm.Database.ADO.select(sql); //if this results in 0 records...

if (mdm.Database.ADO.error())
   throw("handle error here");
else
   arr = mdm.Database.ADO.getData(); //crashes here

Solution

The undocumented but simple way to prevent the crash is: prior to calling getData(), you must first check ensure that getRecordCount() is not zero.

Example

mdm.Database.ADO.select(sql);

if (mdm.Database.ADO.error())
   throw("handle error here");
else if (mdm.Database.ADO.getRecordCount() == 0)
   arr = [];
else
   arr = mdm.Database.ADO.getData();

Conclusion

Ideally Zinc would just return an empty array if no records were found, but since it doesn't, it's nice to know there is an easy fix. I am content with minor problems like this because the benefits Zinc offers - including access to databases and the comport directly from Actionscript - far outweighs the bugs it has.