I need some help with this area. I am 19 and have been I was taught foxpro at school for about a year .I have a little experience in it nothing technical.

I have recently started a job at a company as a network assistant. There is a program which they have asked me to write and i would like some help and any suggestions as to a proper solution.

The situation: This company is using a digital phone network. The system that controls the phones outputs a LOG of all phone call made in REALTIME through a serial port connected to the machine. The log is outputed in an ASCII format and the information is sorted in columns. Now i know once i get that information into a text file i can easily convert it into a database file but the problem is how do i capture that information and save it to a file without the loss of any data.

What is suppose to happen is that a Pc running windows 95 will be connected to the phone system using the serial port. and the information from the system will be captured and processed by programs running on that machine. Now the actual processing of the data is no problem to me. This can be done with a simple set of queries. What i need to know is how i will capture that data.

Can i directly access the comm ports from within foxpro . If i open that comm port will the information remain in that ascii format. how will i buffer the information and then write it to a file. How do i deal with the real-time aspect of the system.

I was thinking of using 2 seperate programs. One which captures the data and saves it to a text file, and the second program to process the information. is this the most efficient way to handle the problem..

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated..
You can email me with information at ggraves@sapience.ca