Hi,

I had a situation yesterday that I have never seen in over a decade of experience with Foxpro. I suspect table corruption (which I've seen from time to time). But I can't be sure about this one. This was unique.

The client has a LAN with a Novell 5.x Server (and they use the Novell client). They have a VFP 5.0 application that sits on this server and has been fine for over a year. All of the sudden, one of the tables with memo fields mysteriously had the contents of a MEMO field disappear (on a number of records).

Upon closer examination, we discovered that the data IS there. It just can't be seen. When we use the Command Window to browse the table, we see that the memo fields have the capialized 'M' indicating that memo data exists for the record. But yet no data can be seen. (It looks empty.)

So we issue a CLOSE ALL and use the table EXCLUSIVE and browse again ... and presto, the memo data can be seen as you would normally expect. So we flip back and forth...

USE < tablename > SHARED && can't see memo data on some recent records.
USE < tablename > EXCLUSIVE && the memo data is back and looks normal.

Since I have the 3rd party utility 'Recover' we ran that thinking that there must be some table corruption of some sort. But Recover didn't find anything wrong with the table.

We fixed the problem by COPY[ing] TO < temptable > WITH CDX, then deleting the original table, then copying the temp table back to the original tablename. After that, the table behaved normal.

But I was at a total loss to explain what we were seeing. I sort of write it off as a network hiccup or something, but I wonder what really happened to cause this.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Any ideas what could cause this behavior?

Guy