The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

March 1994

The L.A Fox Developer is the monthly newsletter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is information sharing among application developers and users working with FoxPro.

LA Fox Address:

LA Fox User Group

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

Kns Dahlin

The newsletter contains regular columns and articles from other user groups.

XPro User Group

2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161

Santa Monica, CA 90403

OC MS FoxPro Developers Group

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 warranties 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 trademarks of their respective owners.

LA Fox President’s Column (con’t from Page 1)

4. By taking advantage of FoxPro’s calling stack and screen snippets you can implement object oriented mechanisms for inheritance, polymorphism, and extension without modification. One of the things I appreciated about Bill’s talk was that he brought the very abstract object oriented ideas closer to home, expressing them in FoxPro terms that we could all understand.

The second speaker, Lisa Slater, is, among other things, author of “Using FoxPro 2.5 for Windows”, one of the best written and most useful and, at 1200 pages, one of the most complete FoxPro books,. While admitting that object oriented ideas are new to her, she noted that in some cases these are different names for familiar concepts ,and proceeded to show how a traditional FoxPro developer could start to think with and use the “new” ideas.

As you would expect from someone with Lisa’s breadth and depth of knowledge, the ensuing discussion and audience questions ranged over a wide variety of FoxPro topics. Of particular interest to me was the idea that she is collaborating on a FoxPro Mac book to be released soon, with Randy Brown and Doc Livingston.

MicroMega Presentation

The presenters at Larry Moore’s Valley West User Group were

the 3 top people at MicroMega Systems, developers of FoxFire.

Chick Bomheim introduced the show, with Andy Neill and Alan

Schwartz leading the discussion.

FoxFire is the premier query and report tool add-on for FoxPro. It first came out in a DOS version some time ago, and has now been released in a much improved Windows version, with the Mac version to be released soon. It provides an end-user friendly way to create ad hoc queries and reports. The interface design is really excellent. After someone sets up the internal data dictionary, the Request Editor dialog allows a user to define queries without knowing obscure field names, and without worrying about table relationships or how to optimize for Rushmore. The Request Manager allows a user to set specific parameter values and request results from a previously stored query or report definition. The results can be viewed on screen or FoxFire will create FRX report definition files and print the results as hardcopy reports.

One of the particular features I like is the ability to do cross tab analysis and print the resulting table even when it spreads horizontally across several pages - FoxFire recognizes the need and automatically creates new FRX files as needed.

Of interest to FoxPro developers, the developer version of the product comes with full source code, is packaged so that it can

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