An Old Man Needs Help

[Boaz Bezborodko]

> From: Bob Stockler <bob at trebor.iglou.com>
> Subject: An Old Man Needs Help
> To: filePro Mailing List <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
> Message-ID: <20070313013236.GA27082 at trebor.iglou.com>
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>
> I used to know how to do this, but brain fade at how many years
> old I am (at this age I can't remember), so I need help (though
> I could probably figure it out myself in a week or two).
>
> The client is on filePro 4.8.?.
>
> He needed a -decending- sort on Invoice Numbers (9,.0).  I added
> a field (9,.0) to the file and populated it with values that are
> "9999999999" - Invoice Number, which worked OK, but it turned out
> that his Invoice Numbers started out in 1992 to be <= 6 digits,
> then (at some point in time, for unknown reasons) became 7 digit
> numbers for a while, and then reverted to being 6 digit numbers,
> so he isn't getting what he wanted.
>
> So I want to give him a decending sort on dates.  I'm thinking,
> add a field to the records - Inverse_Date 10 mm/dd/yyyy - then
> populate it with "12/31/9999" - Invoice_Date, and sort on it.
>
> This is a secondary sort on Customer_Number, so I think this
> should do it.  Will it ? ? ?
>
> Bob (who doesn't need any "Have you tried it?" responses)
>
> -- Bob Stockler +-+ bob at trebor.iglou.com +-+
> http://members.iglou.com/trebor
I'm still using 4.8 and what we do is create a field that contains a
date derived from "12/31/50" - "the date being indexed".  The result is
a field with a descending index on a date field.  Just be sure to update
this field whenever the date is changed.

Boaz