>I have a project which controls our orders season wise, for eg.
>
>Fall 98
>Spring 98
>
>Fall 97
>Spring 97
>
>Now the structure of main dbf files for the particular season are same, only data is changed..
>
>I want to setup one main program which consists subdirectiories for the season...
>
>Like
>
>c:\mainprog
>c:\mainprog\fall98
>c:\mainprog\spr98
>
>& from the software itself it should change the seasons that means, suppose a user selected spr98, all my forms, should load data from that dir...
>
>My questions are :-
>1. How I can do it ??
>2. Whether I'll need multiple dbc files or one is enough.
>3. Some of the files are common also like setup.dbf, which should always load from the main dir. from where software is running, How software is going to handle that..
>
>Any Ideas/Suggestions ??

Vinod,

You should get your hands on Codebook and learn how they did it. In just a few words, your test data resides in a \DATA subdirectory that pertains to your application; ie if SEASONS is the directory where your projects resides, your test data would be in SEASONS\DATA. For your production app, you could have your data just anywhere and you could have several folders, one for Fall 98, another one for Spring 98, etc. This achieved by storing information into the registry and retrieving it from there. Also they have the DataEnvironment defined in code, so you can subclass it at will...This design is only valid if one set of data is strictly independent from the other. Otherwise you should have some COMMON.DBC and your seasons DBC as well. This can be handled but is much more complicated...

If you want a start, check the download page of my web; I have the Codebook dataenviroments explained in one file.

José