The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

The L.A Fox Developer is the monthly newslet-

ter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is

information sharing among application develop-

ers and users working with FoxPm.

LA Fox Address:

LA Fox User Group

Chuck Williams

(310) 539-9439

977 Ashbndge Lane

Harbor City, CA 90710

LA Fox Board of Directors

Chuck Williams, President & Newsletter Editor

David Van Valkenburg, Treasurer

Allen Garfein, Membership

George Dvorak

Warren Rekow

Bill Seldon

Barry Lee

Gerg Dunn

KnsDahlin

The newsletter contains regular columns and

articles from other user groups.

XPro User Group

Randy Unruh

(310) 399-9159

2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161

Santa Monica, CA 90403.

OC MS FoxPro Developers Group

John Miller

(714) 661-5264

Subscriptions

The annual membership fee for the LA Fox

User Group, including subscription to The LA

Fox Developer Newsletter, is $45.

Disclaimer

Neither the LA Fox User Group, the XPro User

Group, the OC MS FoxPro Developers Group,

their officers or board of directors or their

members make any express or implied warran-

ties of any kind with regard to any information

disseminated, including, but not limited to,

warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a

particular purpose.

Opinions provided by newsletter articles, or by

speakers, members, or guests who address the

meetings, are individual opinions only, and do

not necessarily represent the opinions of the

group. All opinions and information should be

carefully considered, and the group is not liable

for any incident or consequential damages in

connection with, or arising out of, the furnishing

or use of any information or opinions.

Brand names and product names may be

trademarks or registered trademarksof their

respective owners.

LA Fox President’s Column (Con’t)

And, oh by the way, there was no "Used()" function as a conve-

nient test of whether a given file was already open. You could,

of course, “Select <alias>” and get an error message if it was

not open. And we did have the “Select 0” command to open the

next available area - and it would return an error if all the areas

were full. Wasn’t that fun. And then there was the perfor-

mance hit from opening and closing data files all through the

application.

Data access was equally primitive. We did have “Scatter” and

“Gather”, but there was no Memo option, so if some silly user

had enough text to require a memo field, you had to find some

other technique - and those commands worked only with an

array, not memvars - and there was no “Blank” option to create

a properly dimensioned array or memvar set - and because

there was no “Copy to Array” or “Append from Array”, the pro-

grams were filled with “Do While” loops for working with data

from multiple records. And finally, the big daddy “SQL Select”

command, that makes our current lives so much better, was not

to be mentioned in Perrysburg at the time - you heard right

again folks, FoxBase Mac applications are just getting SQL data

access.

The compound index idea wasn’t around then, so a data file that

needed a variety of indexes had a set of individual index files,

whichwere much larger than current ones. And none of this

luxury of the CDX automatically opening as the data file is

opened, with all tags maintained. You had to explicitly open

each index, and if you forgot and an index got out of sync, it had

to be rebuilt (if you were able to detect the fact that it hap-

pened).

And consider the Browse construct. For all the griping about

thedifficulty in including it in event-driven environments, it is an

extremely robust and useful command. In its current manifesta-

tion, it includes 30 options which take 16 pages to describe in

the Reference manual. The previous FoxBase Mac Browse had

5 options, required 2 pages to describe, and had so many

limitations as to be practically useless - so this is like a new and

rich feature set for FoxBase Mac developers.

Although FoxBase Mac contained the prototypes of today’s

FoxPro power tools, several new ones have been added and

the others have become much more robust. Today’s Menu

Builder makes it so easy to create multi-level menus with hot

keys (with options easily enabled and disabled, and with pads

dynamically added) that it’s hard to imagine we actually thought

it was great that we could construct a menu using the very

limited menu commands that behaved like an ordinary Mac

menu. Heaven forbid when you had to change the menu some-

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