An Old Man Needs Help

[Bob Stockler]

Ken Brody wrote (on Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 09:21:01AM -0400):

| Quoting Bob Stockler (Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:32:36 -0400):
| [...]
| > The client is on filePro 4.8.?.
| [...]
| > 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)
| 
| "Have you tried it?"  :-)

Well, I later tried it.  I populated a Field in the records where
dt(10,mdyy/) = "12/31/9999" and Field = dt - Invoice_Date.  I then
built an index with the primary sort on Invoice_Number and the
secondary sort on that Field.

In a Browse Lookup, using that index, they still show up in order
of their dates - not in reverse order of them.

I built a demand index on them, and using it they show up in the
order I would have expected using that automatic index (no, I did
not use a descending index in the demand index).

The eventual solution to the problem was to use "FILL=bot" instead
of "FILL=top" in the browse lookup (sorting on Invoice # and date).

BTW, I didn't write this table in the first place, and its author
used "fill=asc,top".  It's worked this way since 1991 or 1992 with
no complaint.  I don't understand the "asc" he used ? ? ?

Bob

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