Most of the instructions in this book assume that you are an experienced VAST Platform user and have worked through many of the examples in Getting Started and the

Visual Programming User Guide. These books provide an introduction to the concepts involved in object-oriented programming, visual programming, and using the VAST Platform tools. If you have not worked through these books, please do so before starting to use this manual.

Before trying out the sample applications, make sure you have installed your ODBC drivers and the VAST Platform Reports components, and loaded the following features into your image:

To construct the sample applications described in this book, you also need to install the sample ODBC text database, as explained in Appendix A, Installing an ODBC text database.