I've got a situation where I will be downloading a data file of customer account information to a web server and need to allow access to it over the web. The file has fixed length records with no delimiting character. The file will contain customer balances and all I need the person to be able to do is view the records, not edit or add records. If DBMan will work, I will be glad to pay the registration fee to save me the time and effort to write my own scripts. Thanks for the help.

Hi there. I think I understand what you would like to do...Basically, you would like to create a database file off-line, load it to the web server, and use DBMAN as a method of searching through and viewing records, right??

Well, we are doing the same thing with our Employee Directory. We are first creating the file through Object Access by extracting data from our College database system. The file is modified off-line by the HR Department via Object Access forms and is then loaded to the Web Server.

I have a few suggestions for your project:

1) Create a database file in Access or Excel and use the | as a delimiter. (You could also specify a space character in the default.cfg file as your delimiter, but I would suggest against this, since when I tested this, some records tended to bleed into one another, since a space character is NOT the best delimiting character to use.)

2) Use Object Access to clean up the variables, so that you will have a clean database file to use for DBMAN.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

The file is a data file from an IBM System 36. I can download it from the System 36 to a PC. If there has to be a delimiting char, we will probably have to write another program which reads in each record, and then writes them to a separate data file with commas (or whatever) separating each field. Actually, this was probably going to need to be done anyway because the original data file has about 50 different fields, and I will only need about 15.

DBMan is set up to read files that have a delimiter, not fixed fields. You would really need to have a delimited file in order to use DBMan. (Probably. )


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JPD

Object Access is a great conversion program. It can take data from almost any data source and then organize the data into whatever format you need or like. Also, there are some FoxPro scripts that can extract data from a large dataset and organize data into separate smaller records.(Yet FoxPro is not my forte' nor choice of programming languages.)

So, in other words, I would say that your project is possible with a little tweaking of your database file to make it run with DBMAN.

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Eliot Lee
Founder and Editor
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
http://www.anthrotech.com/
info@anthrotech.com
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Coconino Community College
http://www.coco.cc.az.us/
Web Technology
Coordinator
elee@coco.cc.az.us

[This message has been edited by Eliot (edited June 15, 1999).]

[This message has been edited by Eliot (edited June 15, 1999).]