The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

April 1999

Why would you want to...

Downgrade From

Visual FoxPro?

By Doug Sherman, Rocky Mountain Fox User Group

During the past few months, I have been contacted by two

organizations in the Denver area looking to acquire FoxPro 2.6

for DOS and/or for Windows with distribution kits. These

organizations had purchased VFP, but had a need to redistrib-

ute a 2.6 application they had purchased with some modifica-

tions. The problem was finding a copy of FPD/FPW 2.6.

The very real frustration now being experienced is that FoxPro

2.6 DOS and Windows environments are still needed and used

by business. With the 2.6 product being out of production and

not available from Microsoft, it makes acquiring it impossible at

any price. The product is also generally not available on the

‘recycled software’ market.

SOLUTION: A short note to Robert Green, Product Manager,

Developer Tools, generated the best possible answer for these

two groups. He said, “The Professional versions of FoxPro 2.6

DOS and Windows should be available for downgrade from

“Supplemental Parts.”

On 3-10-99, I did call Supplemental Parts (800-360-7561).

They indicated that a VFP owner may indeed downgrade to

FoxPro Windows andfrr FoxPrn DOS with proof of ownership of

a VFP product (by supplying information from the product box,

or the Assy-#’s from the VFP CD or diskettes.

The cost of the downgrade (diskettes only) is:

(1) FoxPro 2.6 Windows Downgrade: $51.96 + 5.00 s/h (in-

cludes distirbution Kit).

(2) FoxPro 2.6 DOS DownGrade: $15.00 + 5.00 s/h (includes

distirbution Kit).

(3) A “sidegrade” is defined as owning the PC product and

wanting the Macintosh product, or the reverse. A sidegrade is

also available from Supplemental Parts.

Outand About (Con't from page 2)

apps. For your convenience, this public domain library (along

with its partner, KERN EL.FLL) and associated documentation

will be placed on the LA Fox website, http://www.mesllc.com/

lafox.html, for downloading.

Here’s a New Twist and the Price is Right. Internet service

provider, lnterSquid.com, said it will start offering users free

computers with no strings attached. The service, which re-

quires customers to sign up for 2-1/2 years to qualify, says the

computers it offers won’t be jammed with advertising and other

promotional banners, unlike some other free-PC offers. The

start-up service provider says that with the 30-month $29.99 per

(Con’t, page 6)

Inserting/Retrieving

Files in a DBF

Part 1

by Pat Boen

On some occasions you might want to store files in your DBF in

order to retrieve them later on. For example, you might want to

store icons, bitmaps or waves in a DBF, so that nobody can

change them, and retrieve them from your DBF at the time your

application needs them. Well if that’s what you’re interested in,

then this technical paper is for you.

Memo Files/Fields

The wonderful capabilities of the memo fields of Visual FoxPro

make it possible to store any kind of data. Nobody’s astonished

to be able to store pictures in memo fields or even objects in

general fields. So why not storing ... files ? That’s it! No matter

what type of file... all kinds of files!

The only technical issue to address is to be able to transfer the

content of a file to the memo field. But isn’t that easy? Isn’t a

file simply a string, a big string sometimes I admit.

Reading A File And Placing Its Content In A String

What we need here is to come up with a function that will read

the content of a file whose namc. is pa:sed as a parameter, and

that will return it to the calling process. In fact,,I would even

prefer to get two parameters passed to this function : the name

of the file to read, and the buffer in which I’ll place the content.

The function will return a .T. or.F. value to indicate whetherthe

reading was successful or not. The buffer should of course be

passed by reference.

#define FO_READONLY 0

#define INVALID_HANDLE (-1)

#define FALSE

.F.

#define TRUE

.T.

#define FILEPOS_BEGIN 0

#define FILEPOS_cURRENT I

#define FILEPOS_END 2

FUNCTION CopyFileToVar( cFiIe,cBuffer

LOCAL IRetVaI

LOCAL nHandle

LOCAL nSize

lRetVal = FALSE && Function is not successful by default

nHandle = INVALID_HANDLE && Invalid handle by default

&& If we can find this file

IF ( FILE( cFile))

&& Open it in READ-ONLY mode

nHandle = FOPEN( cFile,FO_READONLY)

&& If we obtained a valid file handle

IF ( nHandle ! INVALID_HANDLE)

&& Get the length of the file now (needed by FREADO)

nSize = FIL_len( nHandle)

&& Read the file

(Con’t, page 4)

Page 3