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 confer-

ence 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 conver-

gence 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 develop-

ment 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.

So.

How ‘bout it?

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