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From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.databases
Subject: Re: dBase tricky INDEXing question...
Message-ID: <10226@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 23 May 88 17:07:04 GMT
References: <529@etn-rad.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <529@etn-rad.UUCP> markus@etn-rad.UUCP (Markus Richardson) writes:
Describing a problem in indexing on date.

#Attempt 1:
#SET EXACT OFF
#USE Trans ALIAS Trans
#INDEX ON LTRIM(STR(trans->account_no))+DTOC(trans->date) TO Trans.ndx

I have a slightly different version of dBASE (McMax on a
Macintosh) so if the below doesn't make sense, that's why.
However, my manual says that DTOC gives you the date as
05/23/88 which is unsuitable for sorting in date order. DTOS,
on the other hand gives you YYYYMMDD, i.e., 19880523, which is
suitable for sorting or indexing. If you want reverse order,
subtract from a large number, i.e.,
INDEX ON LTRIM(STR(trans->account_no))+
STR(100000000-VAL(DTOS(trans->date)))

The simpler solution, which I've always used, is just to store
dates as character strings or numbers. That's all you could do in
the old dBASE I started with anyway.

Incidentally, I tried to send this to you by email but you didn't
list an address and our mail program couldn't handle it
automatically.