Dragan,

{^2200.01.01} - What is this notation, what does it mean ?

Michel Creppy.

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>>It would seem that in FoxPro 2.x the best way to index a table
>>on a DATE field was to index on DTOS(Fieldname) as that
>>created a character based index which proved to be much faster
>>in operation than a date based index where, during comparison,
>>dates had in any case to be converted internally to characters by FoxPro.
>
>It depends on your index expression. If it's a single field, you'd surely index on it as is. In case of date type fields, VFP would probably index on its Julian Day Number. If it's a DateTime, it already is a Julian Day Number (higher four bytes forming a long integer) with number of milliseconds since midnight (another long integer), and it will index probably by converting its both parts using BinToC() function, which should be pretty fast - it only adds a fixed value and swaps bytes around.
>
>If your date (or datetime) field is part of a compound key, DTOS() is the way to go, just to make sure it gets stored in the key expression as yyyymmdd (and be Y2K compliant, as it always was).
>
>BTW, there was a nice trick if one wanted to have a compound index on a character field plus a date field with the char part indexed ascending, and the date descending:
>
>index on char_field+tran({^2200.01.01}-datefield, "999999") to whateverTag
>
>Of course, if I wanted to use it today, I'd use
>
>index on char_field+BinToC({^2200.01.01}-datefield) to whateverTag
>
>The {^2200.01.01} notation is the new trick I learned here the other day :)