The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

April 1995

President’s Column (Con't from page 3)

leading FoxPro author, speaker, and trainer — they don’t come any better than this ! The tour hits Los Angeles on May 8 and 9. The price is $250 per day with several discount options. You can register at

800 331-9434.

The annual dDay Fair is happening again this year. This is a major opportunity for local database

oriented folks to meet and listen to several industry leaders, all in one convenient place, without the

hassle and the price of most database conferences. The date is June 24, and the place is the

Warner Center in Woodland Hills. The price is right

- $25. We will have order blanks at the meeting - or call (818) 889-7022.

Browse (Con't from page 8)

SET EXACT OFF

BROWSE for

main.direction = m.direction AND main.streetype = m.streettype AND main.houseno • m.houssno

KEY m.street

My assumption is that the street name is the item which is most likely to be known. When running the program however, bad response became an issue. If I entered “CANNON” as the street name with everything else empty, response was fast. If I add I character to ANY other field, things got slower. Two characters made it slower still.

In trying to debug the problem I created a small function which always returned TRUE, but added one to a local variable. I put this function in the BROWSE FOR clause so that after the browse was through, I could see how many records were being compared in the FOR clause of the browse. Sure enough, the more thardcters entered in houseno, for instance, the more records werø being compared in the FOR clause, until a full Table search was being performed. I knew that there were 100 records with a street name of “CANNON”, but all I million records were being searched. This is not what I expected at all, but fortunately the solution is very simple.

PUT THE KEY CLAUSE IN FRONT OF THE FOR CLAUSE, and life will be good again. Imagine that!!!...

(Con't page 5)

Hot Tip....

Drive/Directory in FoxPro

by George Dvorak

The test for the existence of a drive or directory is:

?FILE('C:\DOS\nul')

This returns .T. in FoxPro DOS 2.6, FoxPro Windows 2.6, and the beta of Visual FoxPro that was given out at Devcon.

However if the drive and/or directory does not exist, as in:

?FILE(Z:JFLKDSFJSAL\nul')

The return in FoxPro DOS 2.6 and beta Visual FoxPro is .F., BUT the return in FoxPro Windows 2.6 is.T.!!!!!

[George’s CompuServe ID is 71140,3527.)

It Can’t Get Any Easier.......

We’ve come up with an easy way to submit articles to the LA Fox Developer Newsletter one that has been overlooked for a long time.

You can submit your articles to either Chuck Williams

(72330,2326) or Barry Lee (72723,3422) on

Compuserve.

These articles can be on any FoxPro-related topic, whether it concerns a new technique you’ve discovered, a certain development technique you may favor over others, book reviews, etc.

The quality of this newsletter really depends on the members that support it, not just read it. And I think we’d all be surprised by the useful information that could be circulated around the membership.

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