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The LA
Fox Developer Newsletter
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June
1994
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Books and Toys....
[A continuing series featuring add-on products and books supporting FoxPro.]
Recently, I was retained by a medical clinic in Anaheim to convert a DataEase application that they had been running for the last six years to a
FoxPro
app. This app is still under development with a promised delivery date in late August. Having had this system for so long, the primary objective was to develop a very efficient system and still maintain the years of historical data the clinic had accumulated.
Data Ease, for those not familiar
with
it, is a sort of “screen painter’ that will generate applications and input screens once the screens/input fields are defined. It reminded me of a sophisticated version of the old application generator in dBase III+ One of the confusing aspects of using it, though, is that DataEase assigns its own naming convention to data tables, screens, indexes, etc. In other words, if you paint a screen, name it “Patient Input”, DataEase will assign some non-meaningful name to the actual table (such as “PATINAAA.DBM”), another to any indexes (such as “PATINAAF.IOA”, “PATINAAD. 101”, “PATI NAAB. 125”, etc.), and still another to the input form (“PATINAAB.DBA”), with no apparent pattern to the naming conventions. Its only saving grace is that the system will document itself, in terms of tying its generated names to the actual data tables, ff you can afford to take the hours and hours it takes to wade through the documentation to
arrive
at how to do it. (In this case, I didn’t have a choice.)
To further complicate matters, it doesn’t seem to export to any standard file formats that
FoxPro
can read directly (even though it says it does). The exported data always seemed to be “one byte off’. (And trying to read the files with
XTree
only locked up the system.) I finally found a time-consuming way to do it, but the thought of going through this process for about 60 tables wasn’t too thrilling. The results weren’t always consistant and DataEase International certainly wasn’t going to be much help.
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So I started looking around for data conversion tools. About two months ago, I remembered receiving a mailing from Tools & Techniques about a product named Data Junction. And I also remembered receiving a free data conversion tool (which I hadn’t used) from Pinnacle Publishing when I subscribed to
FoxTalk,
Pinnacle’s monthly
FoxPro
newsletter. Imagine my surprise when I found out the Pinnacle disk was actually a “sampler’ of some of the conversion routines from Data Junction. To make circumstances even more fortunate, there was a routine for converting Data Ease data tables.
After a very short (less than one hour) learning curve, I was able to begin conversion of the troublesome DataEase tables. Data Junction was able to go into the DataEase tables find and “interpret back” the original screen names associated with the tables. This proved to be a real life-saver. What could have been days spent in using my kluged-together solution was reduced to a few hours. The data came across 100% with no exceptions. The only adjustment that had to be made was to rename the fields in
FoxPro
since DataEase allows up to 20 characters for field-naming.
Data Junction claims to have an installed base of over 30,000 users, and is also available for Unix and 0S2. It features a “hub-and-spoke” design that lets you filter, edit, and convert many different types of data files. It offers five basic levels and pricings for its product. As an example, the Standard Edition ($99) features conversion routines for dBase, FoxPro, ASCII, Lotus, DIF, and many others. The Professional Edition ($199) will convert all the formats in the Standard Edition plus R:Base, Paradox, DataFlex, Clarion, DataEase, ACT!, Peachtree, and more. The Advanced Edition sells for $299,
while
the
LAN
and Unix Editions are priced at $499.
So, if you received the same mailing I did, dig it out of the trash or go find it. This is one tool that can save your b--- and your client’s data.
But wait, there’s more
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