Filepro and rapid development

[GCC]

I am in the process of writing a new system for and old friend & client.  He
previously used filePro to write systems for two companies he owned and ran.
The first was a drug retail chain and the second was a physician's office
management company.  

In his new endeavor, he convinced his partners that filePro would be the best
and most cost effective way to go for writing custom software for this new
company.  Both of the partners were familiar with C, C## and some of the other
ODBC development languages.

I was up in New York working with them on the system and they requested that
there be a display of questions displayed on the screen where the answer tally
appears.  Since the questions will vary by the person whose record is displayed
and the questions can change over a period of time, the questions could not be
hard coded into the screen.

As their offices are under construction, they left to work with the contractor.
I created a survey file with each record holding all 12 questions and a survey
#.  I the person file, I created a screen with 12 dummy fields and 12 real
fields(holding the numeric values for the weighted answers).  In auto process I
added 7 lines of code. Yes, I know that I could do this at @entsel but I've used
auto processing for too many years.

When they finished their meeting about 1/2 hour later, I showed them how it
worked.  Their response - "You did this while we were out?".

One said it would take a few days of coding to accomplish this in C.  I wasn't
about to argue with him.

The other partner watched me expand a field from 15 to 30 characters and adjust
the screen for the new size in under a minute.  His response, "you mean it that
easy".

It's a shame that it is us, the developer community, that has to "preach the
gospel" of filePro.  Here I am preaching to the congregation.  

Just thought I would pass this on comments from people not familiar with
filePro.

Richard Kreiss
GCC Consulting