March1999

The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

Out and About (Con’t from page 2)

assure your admittance and your room in the host hotel. Get ready for the massive technical training you’ll get at Visual FoxPro DevCon, sponsored by Microsoft and FoxPro Advisor magazine. For further information, keep your eye on FoxPro Advisor Magazine and their website at http://www.advisor.com.

3rd Annual Southern California Visual FoxPro Conference, August 26-29, 1999, DoubleTree Hotel, Costa Mesa, CA. Sponsored by Microcomputer Engineering Services, LLC (MESLLC), this show promises to be one of the highlights of the conference season.The event will be held at The Doubletree Hotel in Costa Mesa, CA, the site of last years conference. We’ll be following the same format of having the opening/ keynote address on the evening of the 26th, with actual sessions beginning on Friday morning, the 27th, and running through Sunday, the 29th. Currently, the confirmed speakers for the conference are Menachem Bazian, Jim Booth, Randy Brown, Gary Dewitt, Mike Feltman, Toni Feltman, Eldor Gemst, Tamar Granor, Y.Alan Gnver, Doug Hennig, Ken Levy, Rod Paddock, John Petersen, Steve Sawyer, and Drew Speedie. More speakers will be “signing up” over the next 30 days to complete the roster. Attendees will have their choice of approximately 70 sessions to sit in on. For further information, keep your browsers pointed to http://www.mesllc.com/conf99.html. For your convenience, the conference registration form can be found on page 9 of this newsletter or you may download it from the conference website. It’s still the best deal going!!

LA Fox Announcements:

Still No Takers . The LA Fox Board has been advertising, since the beginning of the year, for new Board members. Hello... anyone out there?

This month marks the first month of the new

When Relations Don’t Work

Rocky Mountain Fox User Group

Visual FoxPro is based on the relational database model proposed by E.F. Codd in 1970. His techniques became known as data normalization. They work great almost all the time. This article is about one of those times that the data is not normal, and needs to break the rules.

I was asked to author a FoxPro system to create, pnnt, and process employee surveys. These surveys consist of a Scantron forms or answer sheets with both the person that will be filling it out and the person that will be reviewed. This is called a 360 review process, where a number of individuals review each other. There is a Survey data table that includes the Rater and Ratee names with a form ID. It has one record for each answer sheet.

LA Fox is looking for a few people to replace Board of Director members who have either moved out of the area or have gone inactive. The Board consists entirely of volunteers who meet approximatley four times a year. It is responsible for LA Fox policies and general direction of the group, among other things. The Board also elects the officers. Together, the officers and the Board make sure that LA Fox runs smoothly.

The requirements are quite simple. You must be a current active member (i.e., “paid up”) and willing to commit to making the Board meetings.

If you’re interested, contact me by phone (800) 499-6237, (714)

375-3300, or e-mail brlee@earthlink.net

There is a Question data table that contains the questions that will be asked with a form ID as the key field. There are 22 questions that will be asked on side one of this answer sheet. Why not relate them together and generate the answer sheets? Well Dr Codd doesn’t like that. We are limited to either a “oneto-one” or a “one-to-many” relationship. This is a “many-to- many” relationship. The Survey data table will have thousands of records that will need to relate to the same 22 records in the Questions table.

One way to solve this problem is to load the question text into an array and use the values in the array in the report generator. To do this I placed the following code in the INIT of the data environment of the report generator.

PUBLIC Ialtems(2,22) on front side