The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

September 1994

Out and About (Con't from page 2)

submit articles via CompuServe (see “It Can’t Get

Any Easier”) or bring a disk with your article (in

ASCII text format) to any LA Fox meeting.

Call for new board members. With the departure

of Greg Dunn, and a basic “clean-up” of inactive

board members, we now have a limited number of

openings on the LA Fox Board of Directors. There

are no special requirements for these positions,

other than an active interest in seeing the group

prosper. Board meetings occur, on average, every

other month and take about three hours of your

time. Decisions made at these meetings affect the

direction of the group, as well as internal policies.

Those interested may contact Chuck Williams at

(310) 539-9439 or CIS# 72330,2326 or Barry Lee

at (714) 968-4225 or CIS# 72723,3422. And, as

usual, member of LA Fox is welcome to par-

ticipate in the board meetings on a “come-at-

(Con't, page 9]

Hot Tips....

[Ed. Note: This month’s Hot Tip comes from Jim

Slater, Vice President of the Rocky Mountain Fox

User Group in Denver, Colorado, via its monthly

newsletter, Fox Footnotes.]

FoxPro Tips Through Experience

By Jim Slater

No Comment

Frequently I find the need to comment out a large

block of code temporarily while testing a program,

then restore the block when I am done. Typing a

"*" before each line, then deleting it later can be

tedious. Instead, I just surround the code I want to

skip with

Since the IF statement can never be true, all code

between it and the ENDIF is skipped. When I’m

done, I just remove the IF and ENDIF lines - a lot

easier than removing the "*" from each line.

NOCLOSing the Main Foxpro Window

Virtually all Windows applications include a “Control

menu” - the box at the upper left corner of the main

program window that gives you the options Restore,

Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close, and Switch

To. These options can cause problems in Foxpro for

Windows, particularly the “Close” selection. If a user

selects Close, Foxpro will summarily shut down, losing

any unsaved data.

To prevent this, issue this command at the beginning

of your program: “MODIFY WINDOW SCREEN

NOCLOSE” . This will take away the “Close” option

from the control menu. Note that Foxpro for Windows

refers to its main window by the name “SCREEN”.

And no, you cannot abbreviate it to MODIFY WIN-

DOW SCRE - you must use the full word SCREEN.

The “MODIFY WINDOW SCREEN” command has

several other uses as well:

1. You can disable the Move, Size, Minimize, and

Maximize controls by using the keywords NOFLOAT,

NOGROW, NOMINIMIZE and NOZOOM respectively.

2. You can change the “Foxpro for Windows” title

on the main window with “MODIFY WINDOW

SCREEN TITLE ‘<your title here>’ “.

3. You can change the background to a picture

with “MODIFY WINDOW SCREEN FILL FILE <bitmap

file name here>”. Once you have done this, how-

ever, you may need to exit Foxpro to get rid of it!

Handling Deleted Records in Rushmore

From time to time someone tells me that even though

they have created the right indexes, Rushmore doesn’t

seem to do much to speed up their commands and

queries. Frequently, the answer lies in how

Rushmore handles deleted records and a simple fix

gives them the speed they need.

In order to understand this problem, we need to know

a little about how Rushmore works. If you issue a

command such as COUNT FOR state = “CO”,

Rushmore checks the index tags you have set up for

this table to see if there is a tag on the “state” field. If

so, it analyzes the CDX file to determine how many

(Con’t, page 7)

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