>I developed a small serching application for an insurance company that uses a table with extremely private information about my company and relations with our customers/members. I send out an updated table each week that is used to refresh the existing information in the table. Is there a way to protect this table from being accessed or read by another package. Even though we have an agreement with this company to keep the information private and not to access for other uses, I fear that my company information in this table is at risk of being used for other purposes not intended for this application. Is there a way (with VFP) to protect this data from being accessed from outside of the application?
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>Thanks for any suggestions.
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>John

Hi,

As far as I know there is no way to encrypt a table as a whole. You can however encrypt character based fields using utilities like CIPHER (it is on this site under Files..). This means that you have to change your programs and forms etc. to work with the encrypted data (encrypt fields to memory variables, let the user edit the contents of the variables, copy them back to the table in an encrypted format).

If the transport of your data on disk is the only critical phase, I would suggest packing your files to an .ARJ or .ZIP, with a password.

Also, if the data in the table is static (doesn't need to be changed by the user), you can include the table in the project, and make an encrypted version of your .APP (see the project options).

Hope this helps...