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 confer-

ences. 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 every-

thing 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 “CAN-

NON”, 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 discov-

ered, 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.

So.

How’boutit?

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