System date behavior wish (GRX)

[Bob Stockler]

Chris Sellitto wrote (on Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 09:19:45AM -0500):

| I don't know (or remember) if this topic has been broached in the
| past, but here goes.  I was wondering how difficult it would be to
| have the @system date fields retain their values upon copying new
| records.  I know it would be just as easy carrying a date field on
| the record, but I feel this is an inefficient way of doing things,
| not to mention a waste of field space.  We archive our data here on
| a regular basis, and having this option would be great.  Maybe have
| a new flag on the copy command that would instruct filePro to
| retain its system dates (@cd, @ud, @bd).

A Work-A-Round until you get your wish . . .

Creat two Alien filePro Files, one with its "real file" the "key"
file from which you're archiving, the other's "real file" being
the "key" file of the file to which you're archiving.

The file layouts (map files) would have field #1 length 20, edit *,
for filePro's info, with the rest of the map similar to the fields
in the source and destination files.

Do your archiving using these Alien files.

Copy the record to be archived, intact, from the source file to
the archive file (binary filePro File I/0 is good for this).

Make all characters in Field #1 of the source file record be equal
to chr("0") (ie: NUL), then make all characters in the balance of
that record be equal to " ") (ie: Space), then write it.

Run "freechain" on the source file.  Presumeably, you'll be archiving
only active (used) records, so it's not necessary to run "freechain"
on the archive file.

The result will be that @cb, @ub, @cd, @ud, and @bd are preserved
with their original values in your archive file.

Bob

-- 
Bob Stockler  +-+  bob at trebor.iglou.com  +-+  http://members.iglou.com/trebor