filePro help needed...

[John Esak]

filePro'ers
	
I got a call from Dale Egan asking if I am truly retired... Did I want some
work?  :-)  Very hard for the inner "me" to say, "Yes, I'm really retired,
and No, I don't want (or need?) the work!"  Well, the need part left
aside... Maybe a year or two from now I'll be begging for something...
Anything to do... But for now, I am so happy getting my little studio
together and writing some new fiction as well that I don't want to take on
new work.  I really just hate responsibility these days. :-)  Also,
periodically, I am continuing to help 21st Century with some of the projects
which keep them very busy.

So... I told Dale I would explain the project he wants help with, and put a
note out here for those of you who can do it to give him a call.  I don't
know any of the particulars, but I wrote something very nearly like this for
Nexus, but never put the finishing touches on it.  Now, because of something
Bob R. at anzio.com has done to enhance Anziowin, will make the project a
snap. And, would probably (if done generically enough) be something one
would sell to lots of filePro users.  Apparently, now Anziowin can be made
to scan documents and store/transport the image somewhere with an assigned
name. (Maybe it's done this awhile, and it's not new... don't know.)
Anyway, what Dale wants to do is scan documents from any filePro record (I'm
guessing a customer record). The documents scanned would be anything
invoices, work sheets, who knows.  But, the image file would be "attached"
to the record by some unique key and naming convention and stored on a share
or anywhere that the users (and filePro) can get to them.  Anyone going to a
record could press an @key and pull up a browse of the images and view them.
Now, of course, this is all dead simple and I would hesitate to say how many
hours, not even days this would take for me to write.... Heck, once I
investigated the part that Bob's program does as its function, the actual
skeleton of the code would probably really only take minutes.  But, I like
Scotty on the Enterprise would say, "Oh that will take 6 days Captain!"...
:-)  Seriously, whatever time it would take you, I'm sure Dale and you could
arrange a project price or maybe even a price per/hr, but I think I heard
him say he would not want it on an hourly basis... (don't blame him
really... viz the statement I just made above. :-)  

But, anyway, this is not a tough deal and could bring in someone a little
work in these trying times.  Dale is a good guy, reliable help with a
project and not too shabby a filePro programmer himself, but he has just
bought the Lee Myles (auto maintenance, transmissions?) company and pretty
much has his hands full.  So email him if you're interested.

I had immediately mentioned Sound Idea's version of this function (written
in C), but Dale told me he had already checked that out a little, and it
relies on some things that Bob's terminal emulator doesn't need, like a VPN
maybe and other constraints.  

Dale's email address is dale at eganauto.com.

I don't mean to make light of how easy or hard this project is. The devil is
always in the details, but really this is a simple browse routine looking
through a header detail file arrangement and nothing more.  It does not even
require any pig browse capabilities, so if you have a good facility with
building an @key that doesn't lock the record (which I hope is SOP for
everyone these days), and an understanding of good file-naming schemes,
you're there.

Now, why did I write this instead of Dale?  Simple, he called me because I
wasn't in the FP Room tonight or last night. I found a new blues bar... Very
high energy, great players... Thursday nights are open for all.... So now
there are 3 nights a week I can do some playing and I'd rather do that than
write code.... But he told me honestly that if he wrote this note... he
thought he would be assailed with all the kinds of things people used to
assail the "newbie" with in the past. Happily, it's not too much like that
anymore.  But, I said I'd lay it out for him. Again, it seems easy... But
who knows what you'll encounter... Maybe multi-user contention for the
scanner?  Permissions problems on the files, or worst of all...  creeping
feature-ism! :-)  

Good luck to whoever ends up doing this.  If... A year has gone by, and I'm
tired of having fun, playing drums, writing music and science fiction....
And maybe for some insane reason am actually bored out of my mind.... AND
this project still hasn't been written... Well then, maybe.... Possibly....
Perhaps... I'll write it, but no one should be holding their breath. :-)

John Esak