The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

March 2000

Who’s Going to DevCon? (Con’t from page 5)

gone out of his way to play down the effectiveness, timeliness, and necessity for the NOLA conference to a community that has always thirsted for more VFP knowledge. That same community he couldn’t waste the time on to prepare sessions that he “can’t use again”, but is more than happy to sell books to. I find it particularly ironic that Pinnacle Publishing, the company he writes for (“FoxTalk”, “The Information Systems Consultant”, etc.) is one of the sponsors of the NOLA conference and is currently displaying the conference banner on the front page oftheirwebsite (http://www.pinpub.com).

(Ed. Note: For more on this discussion, visit the Universal Thread at http://www.universalthread.com.]

One More Time (Con’t from page 7)

Perhaps there is in the foreseeable future an interesting convergence of these forces that may have a significant effect on this situation. I don’t mean to make a pre-millenial cry of doom, just a “heads up” that we may be on the verge of some interesting sea-changes in the IT industry.

sure hope so. I don’t think things can get much worse.

ADO Jumpstart (Con’t from previous column)

type ADLongVarChar have the adFldLong Bit set. The Notes field of the Employees table is of the type adLongVarChar.

The following code fetches data from the notes field in 10-byte chunks:

Local nBytesRead,cChunkRead

nBytesRead = 0

cChunkRead = Space(0)

Do While .T.

nBytesRead = nBytesRead + 10

cchunkRead = oRecordset.Frields("notes").GetChunk(10)

If IsNuII(cChunkRead) Or;

nBytesRead > oRecordset.Fields(”notes”).ActualSize Exit

Else

?cChunkRead

Endif

EndDo

Successive calls to GetChunk continue where the previous call ended. The GetChunk method is very useful when you need to stream data or only need to see the first few characters of a large text field.

(To be continued...]

(Ed. Note: I can’t find a book, but the article on “Dumbing Down of Programming”~ by Ellen’ Ullman, is at www.salon.com/21 st/feature/1 1993/05/cov_1 2feature.html.]

ADO Jumpstart (Con't from page 8)

ActualSize—Represents the length of the actual data element in a datasource. To illustrate, consider the Country Field object again. In the case where the value is Germany, the ActualSize property is 7, while the DefinedSize property is still 15.

NumericScale—Specifies how many digits to the right of the decimal place are stored.

Precision—Specifies the maximum number of digits to be used for numeric values.

In addition to these properties, GetChunk is one interesting method you are likely to use. This method allows you to progressively fetch portions of the contents of a field object. This method is very useful when dealing with large text fields. It can be used only on fields where the adFldLongBit set of the Attributes property is set to true (.T.). See the next section for details on the Attributes property. Understand that fields of the

(Con’t, next column)

It Can’t Get Any Easier......

We’ve come up with an easy way to submit articles to the LA Fox DeveloperNewsletter one that has been overlooked for a long time.

You can submit your articles to Barry Lee at CIS# 72723,3422 on Compuserve, or bdee@earthlink.net.

These articles can be on any FoxPro-related topic, whether it concerns a new technique you’ve discovered, a certain development technique you may favor over others, book reviews, etc. Editor reserves the right to edit or offer constructive comments concerning submitted articles and accepted articles shall be considered to be in the public domain.

The quality of this newsletter really depends on the members that support it, not just read it. And I think we’d all be surprised by the useful information that could be circulated around the membership.

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