The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

March 1999

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 Confer-

ence, 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 ses-

sions 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 approxi-

mately 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!!

Since We Last Met

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?

The Newsletter.

This month marks the first month of the new

When Relations Don’t Work

By Joe Pecukonis,

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.

(Con’t, page 6)

LA Fox Needs

a Few Good People

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 “one-

to-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

ImCount = I

(Con’t, page 8)

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