1

FOX 2000 - One Approach
by Michael Merino, Rocky Mountain Fox User Group

In trying to find all critical items for potential Year 2000 problems
in FoxPro, I come up with one systematic approach that uses a
Fox program calling Norton Utilities’ [version 8.0 DOS] TEXT
SEARCH command. I’ll illustrate my approach with the Pur-
chase program, a Fox2.5 DOS application consisting of approxi-
mately 170 programs, reports, forms! screens, etc. This
approach should work both for Fox 2.5 DOS and Visual Fox.
This approach also works for Fox executables, as well as non-
Fox database applications, in our case files created by
PRODAS, a statistical package used Denver Public Health.

There are several notes to make concerning the following
program. One of the few things this approach will NOT find is
dates that are built from three separate fields as in DD MM YY.
In addition I specified the types of files to search for because of
time factors, doing the following program on a 4GB network hard
drive took 63 minutes on a Pentium 75.

1.
! run the program M200°.prg [see be!cw) which automatically
searches all databases for date fields, then takes these names
and runs Norton’s text search to compile a list of every occur-
rence of these names. Note M2000.prg also includes a few
functions for the text search: DATEO, CENT (from SET CENT
OFF), DTOC, DTOS, CTOD, YY (for items like MM/DD/YY),
MDV.
2.
I print out these four text files to begin my investigation
3.
Now I am ready to edit these programs so I start FOX and
immediately type

SET CENT ON

then go into the first prg file and start checking using Cntl F
with the search term: DATEO. I also now know the form or
screen set and report files that need to be adjusted for the
increased date field lengths.
4.
when completed I may need to rebuild forms! screen sets in
various projects as well
When done, I’ve completely checked the Purchase program to
make sure it is Year 2000 compliant!
(Con’t, page 3)
At LA Fox...
Out and About
by Barry R. Lee


June 15, 1998, 6:30 PM - Ken Levy. Ken is a software
engineer consulting for Microsoft. Ken formerly worked at Flash
Creative Management, Inc. specializing in the research, design,
and creation of application development tools. While working as
a consultant at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Ken developed several public domain programs including
GENSCRNX, PTX Editor, and other FoxPro tools. Ken can be
reached at www.classx.com. Furthermore, Ken is probably one
of LA Fox’s more illustrious alumni. The working title of his
session is “Things You Can Do With VFP 6.0” and he’ll be
spending some time on VFP6/DHTML/XML. (“I think XML is
more important than most people realize.”.. .Ken) And the
evening is sure to be punctuated with “Oh...ohfl! Here’s some-
thing I just thought of...”.


July 13, 1998, 6:30 PM - Rick Strahl. Please note the
change of date for this very special meeting. The last time
Rick Strahl presented to LA Fox, he broke all existing records
for meeting lengths. Rick will be doing a three-day stand in
Southern California, stopping by LA Fox on July 13th, OC Fox
on the 14th, and XPro on the 15th. His topic for LA Fox will be
“Building Distributed Applications with VFP”, and ‘Web Con-
nection” at OC Fox and XPro. You can prepare for this event by
visiting his website at http://www.west-wind.com [Ed. Note: If
you want to catch the other two nights ... Oranqe County FoxPro
Developers Group normally meets at 7:00 PM on the 2nd
Wednesday of each month in the Hard Disk Cafe at Ingram
Micro, 1600 St. Andrews, Santa Ana. From anywhere, take a
In this issue
Spam Alert
VFP Weds Web to Data
RYITFSWLYPKCKOPR
Page 4
Page 6
Page 7
and much more
The LA Fox Developer
A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California
Visit our WebSite at: http://www.mesllc.com/lofox.html June 1998
The June meeting of LA Fox will be held on
June 19, 1998, at 6:30 PM at our regular
meeting place (the Torrance Airport, 3301
Airport Drive, in Torrance). For details on
how to get there, see the map on the back
page.

1