Last night I had the honour of presenting an overview of the use of FoxPro at SkyTrain to approximately 150 attendees at the Vancouver BC VANTUG (Vancouver Technical Users Group) meeeting. I had very many positive comments from the attendees on the presentation and several said that they would be taking a second look at Visual FoxPro as a result of what they had seen.

SkyTrain is the largest fully automated transit system in the world and comprises 49 km of track, 32 stations and 210 driverless vehicles. FoxPro is used for almost all computer systems within the organization except those directly involved with the operation of the vehicles and subsystems.

At SkyTrain we use FoxPro for most MIS functions. These include the usual range of business activities such as Accounting, HR, Payroll, Job Costing and also such activities as Vehicle and Wayside Maintenance, Access Permit Scheduling, Training, Safety Program, Technical Library, etc. In all there are approx 60 applications available to our staff. Version control and access rights are part of the overall SkyTrain Software Systems architecture which is, of course, developed in FoxPro.

To make the presentation more engaging for the attendees we chose to highlight some of the more unusual applications and applets that we have developed using VFP at SkyTrain. These included:

-STAR a graphical analysis tool providing a detailed report on the daily operations of the SkyTrain system. It demonstrates how useful VFP is for generating 'subsidiary' code (in this case HPGL) and its powerful data manipulation capabilities.

-ATC MIMIC. This application displays the location of the whole fleet of 210 vehicles in real time with drill down capability to see the status and history of each vehicle.

-HR DATALOGGERS These data loggers are modular in design. They are used to gather operational information from the heterogeneous Operations Computer systems. Their key features are:
a) They are easily configurable to accommodate almost any form of data feed. b) They can continue to log data to a local drive when the LAN that they are connected to is unavailable.

-DATALOGGER VIEWER This data mining tool can present data from up to 8 separate and heterogeneous sources rapidly and seamlessly. It is a good example of the use of local views and other VFP techniques to provide an effective and intuitive tool.

-TRIGGERS. A server that responds to any logical condition and performs designated tasks as a result. We use this server to automatically generate pager messages to our field staff in the event of a detected train fault.

-SKYVOICE. An automated voice announcement system that can make ad hoc or prerecorded announcements to the trains or stations triggered either by time or by a train reaching a particular location.

-WORKTODO. Our own workflow architecture that allows us to automate the process of review, approval and notification throughout the organization.

-OMS GATEWAY. An unusual application that allows us to communicate with a foreign Object Oriented Database to determine what is happening on the SkyTrain system. It is an example of programming with VFP at the TCP/IP level.

-PDA FARE CHECKING. This system integrates Fare Checking PDA derived data collected by our on-board inspectors with a central database. It is used for analysis of fare evasion and compliance.

-IMAGEVIEWER. A drawing/image viewing tool that presents a collection of associated images (such as a set of technical drawings) as a catalogue and also as a tree for easy navigation. Users can zoom, pan and print etc.

-PHONELIST. This is a systray applet that presents the company phone list, the users personal list from Outlook, relevant other phone numbers, access to the complete white pages plus an Internet search tool to find any telephone number.

-MySKYTRAIN. A personal portal to the MIS that is configurable to the individual users needs allowing for flexibility in what a user sees and how it is presented.

-WEBSITES showing recent developments using .net and VFP to provide remote access to our users and qualified partners.

We suspect that our FoxPro installation is the 'largest' in the Pacific North West (although I must admit I have no standard way of measuring size). I would be interested in hearing from other large FoxPro shops, particularly anyone who wishes to challenge our claim :)