LA Fox member Jon Melvin will be our speaker for March.

The topic will be "Polling for Environmental Data with a FoxPro based System".

A VFP-based polling system for interrogating environmental monitoring equipment at gas stations, parsing the resulting data, and uploading the results into a web data system, will be described. The system includes various complex algorithms:

1. Table driven inquiry of remote microprocessor-based data collectors.
2. Parsing of the responses from the data collectors according to algorithms described by a custom-created parsing language.
3. Fault-tolerant modem and telnet communication with retries, various timeouts, and provision for primary and fallback long distance service access numbers.
4. A class library used for uploading the data into a remote SQL database.
The infrastructure and licenses required for deployment of the system in a production environment will also be described.

This application is algorithm intensive - it has a minimal user interface and can be run in batch mode as well as interactively. It provides a good example of how Visual FoxPro can implement complex procedures for data communication and parsing.

Dr. Jonathan Melvin has been programming since 1961, and recently started a corporation (Vision Implementers, Inc.) that develops web-based data systems. The system described in this talk works with a web-based data system, written in Active Server Pages, that allows viewing and reporting of the polled data, tracking problems at gas stations dentified by this data and the step-by-step resolution of these problems, and generating of various reports.

For more details, please visit http://www.lafox.org. See you there!

Bill Anderson