The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

June 1994

Books and Toys....

Saved by the Junction

by Barry R. Lee

[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.

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. Imag-

ine 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 convert-

ing 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 Stan-

dard Edition plus R:Base, Paradox, DataFlex, Clarion,

DataEase, ACT!, Peachtree, and more. The Ad-

vanced 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

(Con’t, Page 9)

Page 8