Jerry,

>Doug, in your reply to Jerry, why do you say VFP is the premier ISAM data file manager? I'm working on a project to get some data out of ISAM files created by a UNIX application and would like to use VFP to do it. Any more info?

Well, when I said 'ISAM' I was referring to the underlying data engine in VFP that makes it arguably the fastest data management platform for the desktop. That plus the memory management. As far as your particular situation goes, I'm sorry, but I don't have a whole lot of UNIX experience, though I did once write some programs in FoxPro for Unix. That version ran on SCO.

In your particular case I suppose I'd recommend exporting the data you have out to a text file and reading it into a VFP table; or tables. The other approach I'd take would be to see whether or not there was some sort of ODBC driver available that VFP could take advantage of.

Would I be correct in presuming that you have some sort of Windows emulator on this UNIX box? That would make it easier for VFP to "get at" your data..

Does any of this help at all...?




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>Ernie
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>>1. Create a series of classes to manage and control my application - unless I can find one already available. I'm thinking along the lines of a distribution, maintenance and upgrade object that handles just that for EXEs, Data and other issues.
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>>This is the 'big one' for me right now. I need to be able to manage literally thousands of users, each with a different state & county data set, sometimes multiple. Each data set can be up to several CD's worth of data. That's why we want to use VFP on the desktop - the premier ISAM data file manager - period. Hpwever, once the initial data set has been installed updates are relatively trivial. These can be done over the Internet easily, say in a nightly maintenance mode kind of approach. I already have developed a method for updating individual field values which saves me the hassle of sending a whole record if only one field changes. Web Connection is ideal for handling this and can also scale - a big issue as well, should we grow as we'd like.