The LA Fox Develooer Newsletter

November 1997

LA Fox Giveaways

The Universal Thread is a powerful forum engine serving different

software, technologies and other subjects, like Visual FoxPro,

Corel Applications, Visual Basic, Windows NT and more.

Thousands of members from around the world are using it on a

regular basis. It contains threaded messages, customized

sessions, folders, customized accounts, search engines,

reports, live conferences, mailing list interface, private

messages, profiles, available positions, independent consultant,

companies consulting, training, books, software, user groups,

conferences, FAQs, files and more. The Premier Universal

Thread Membership, which will be one of the raffle prizes at the

next meeting, gives full access to the Universal Thread. Get

access to the Universal Thread Navigator, the powerful online!

offline reader for the Universal Thread to allow you to save time

and money, receive the daily Universal Thread News Service, be

eligible to interesting discounts on 3rd party products, be able

to search, etc. The Premier Universal Thread Membership is the

perfect tool you were looking for. Get all the Premier Universal

Thread Membership benefits at http://www universalthread.com!

register.html.

LA Fox Board Meeting

Announced

LA Fox will be holding a Board Meeting on Thursday, Decem-

ber 3, 1997, at Denny’s, at 7:00 PM. Denny’s, the usual “after-

meeting” meeting place is located adjacent to the intersection

of the Harbor Freeway (110) and Pacific Coast Highway (1).

Topics of discussion will include the Christmas party organiza-

tion/planning, any new direction or avenues to be explored by

the group in 1998, as well as defining the new membership/dues

policy which has begun to be formulated over the last 2-3

months.

The LA Fox Board is a much-unheralded group of volunteers

that determine the direction of the group, formulate policies, and

make sure everything runs smoothly from month-to-month.

Any member-in-good-standing (“paid-up”) is welcome to partici-

pate in these meetings. If you can’t make it to the meeting, and

would still like your voice to be heard, please contact any of the

individuals listed on page 2. If you would like to actively partici-

pate in the Board, please come and volunteer. The Board

meets approximately 2-3 times over the course of the year, so

participation doesn’t take up a lot of time.

Your comments and suggestions are very important to us. LA

Fox enjoys a rather good reputation nationally, and it is due to

the strength and participation of its membership. So come and

“be counted”.

SQL Views in VFP

by Nelson Johnson, CCP

Updating a list box or grid was killing me. I had been doing

things the old fashioned way using SELECT ... FROM... to

reload the new data and then do a .REQUERYO or .REFRESHO

method on the control with no success. I also tried to re-

establish the RowSource property for the control, but that only

made the control loose its mind - it would loose all the columns

and properties I had set up. Then I went to the PAFOX meeting.

The secret is Views. If you create a View for the RowSource for

the control, you can do a REQUERY(<cViewName>) function

and that will automatically refresh the control with the newly

selected data. A view can be set up with a screen that looks

similar to the old ROBE screen from Fox 2.6. A major advan-

tage though is that you can pass parameters into the view by

placing a”?” in front of the selection criteria expression you

want to use as a parameter. If you are going to use a parameter

that depends on some control or property in the form you are

just starting up, there is a trick to watch out for. Since the Data

Environment loads before the form, you need to set the

NoDataOnLoad property of the view to .T. which prevents the

query from running. Then when your forms Activate event is

triggered, you can REQUERY(<cViewName>) to load/update

the list or grid.

View a file through its native program:

Here is a program that, when passed a fully formed path to a file

you want to view, (for example “C:\DATA\TIPS.DOC”) and if you

have the appropriate application registered (installed) in win-

dows, this will load that file into that application and allow you to

see the file. It uses the extension of the file name you pass to

get the application name from the [EXTENSIONS] section of the

WIN.lNl file. I have included a function from my utility library

called zxlniPrs() which will Parse an INI file and return what you

ask for. It is up to you to provide and install the software that

actually does the viewing.

PROGRAM: view.prg

aVERSION: 1.0

USAGE:

allows foxpro to view a file with a windows registered

program

*

*CALLDFR:

INPUTS: cFile name of the file (full path and extension)

* AUTHOR: Nelson M. Johnson, CCP

*

a NOTES: This program runs under VFP 3.0, but It can run under

2.6 If you

a either 1. remove the MESSAGEBOX() or 2. have FOXTOOLS.FLL

loaded

(Con’t, page 4)

Page 3