Can filepro do drill downs like acess?

[Bill Vermillion]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 08:20:19PM -0600, Mike Schwartz-PC Support & Services thus spoke:
> > can filepro do things that look like acces drill downs?
> > can we compete with this kind of programing?
> > thanks
> > old tony

>  One way I've simulated drill downs is with browse lookups.
> Another is with opening up additional *clerk sessions.

>  I kind of miss the old "NuViews" database. It was built around
> the concept of drilldowns. However, that was just about the
> *only* thing that NuViews did well... <grin>

>  Actually, the accountants killed NuViews when I was doing
> programming at one of the Fortune 500 companies, because when
> users drilled down to previous accounting periods, they were
> allowed to *change* the data, and that meant that there was no
> way to permanently close an accounting period. (Access still
> has that problem, I believe. There's no way to prevent a user
> from drilling down into the order history and changing or even
> deleting an order from last month or even last year.)

> 	That's why drill down databases are seldom used for any type of
> accounting function.

But can't program data changes be prevented by the program itself.

In one FP ap I wrote for a place that had a lot of temporary help,
any fiancical transaction entered was there forever.  It could not
be changed, and the only way to correct data was to make an entry
that offset the original.  

Even on an active database if certain financial data was changed,
the original field and the newly entered field were written out to
another database. IOW if any figure was entered into a money field
it was there forever.  If you mis-typed it, you had to enter
another record that corrected the original.  It was a throw back to
the old double entry book-keeping.

When laser disks were first being used for large data storage, and
since they were write-one read forever [their acronymn was WORF for
awhile before it was changed to WORM] it was touted as being as
good as double entry.  A new entry would repoint the data to the
newly written sector and the old sectors were then unreadable by
the application.  But special software was available to be able to
see every transaction that had been made.

It was even better than a paper trail as you could not just
recreate one document and destroy the original without destroying
hundreds of originals.

Unless I'm missing something I fail to see why with proper
programming you can't fix data so that once it is entered it can
not be changed without changing the programs.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com