Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!silver!tsui
From: tsui@silver.bacs.indiana.edu
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: foxbase problem, need help
Message-ID: <20900010@silver>
Date: 28 Jul 89 18:02:00 GMT
Organization: Indiana University CSCI, Bloomington
Lines: 48
Nf-ID: #N:silver:20900010:000:1253
Nf-From: silver.bacs.indiana.edu!tsui    Jul 28 13:02:00 1989


Hello everybody!

   I have the following problem which I can't solve and would like to hear
solutions from you.

   I have to locate records according to arbitrary number of fields in the
database, the database is decomposed into several files to avoid redundency.
The condition of the fields depends on the user's input.  What I did is
to set up a string varible to construct a condition and then use &macro to
do the search, so it goes like this:

&& this assumes the database is in one file
&& otherewise we have to construct condition(J), an array to hold conditions

use aBatabase

DO initialize && initialize condition,I

Do while (I <=MAXFIELDS)
   @somewhere get fields(i) valid somecondition
   if (userinput is empty for field(i)) then
      i = i+1
      loop
   else 
      condition = condition+"("+field(i)+")"+"="+userinput(i)
   endif
   i = i+1
Enddo

Locate for &condition
...

Everything looks fine... but sometimes it crashes with a message:
line too long.  The problem is that the user input can be very long,
something like a string of length 60, and the MAXFIELDS is upto 12...

Now how can I get around this problem?

BACKGROUND:

FOXBASE+ 2.01 (?) single user, runing on an AT.

Thanks!

--yufeng

tsui@silver.bacs.indiana.ede