Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!amdahl!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!steve
From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: dBASE III+ bug?
Message-ID: <21458@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 11 Mar 89 00:35:07 GMT
References: <6056@bsu-cs.UUCP>
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Distribution: na
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <6056@bsu-cs.UUCP> neubauer@bsu-cs.UUCP (Paul Neubauer) writes:
#*Here is a question for anyone out there more knowledgeable than I about
#*dBASE.  I am doing an application involving several tables (.DBF files)
#*where the main key for the principal table is the connection to the
#*subsidiary tables.  Specifically, the main table is a table of service 
#*requests and there are (several) other tables of, e.g. equipment needed,
#*etc.  Each of these tables may contain one or more items related to the
#*requests table.  I determined to use the request key as the relating field
#*and I then number the items in a category, e.g., equipment orders, so that
#*each item of equipment will have its own number.  I then index on
#*	request_no+str(item_no)
#*since the request number is a character string (though all digits) and the
#*item_no is a number (I do minimal arithmetic on it, i.e. increment it from
#*the preceding one).  The problem arises when I add new items to the items
#*table.  In order to enable default values for several fields, I use
#*APPEND BLANK and then REPLACE the default values into those fields.  What
#*happens then is that the new records are not indexed properly.  REINDEXing
#*solves that, but I certainly do not want to REINDEX every time I add a
#*record.  Experimentation has revealed that if I change the item_no field to
#*a character field instead of a numeric field the index is maintained
#*properly and automatically, but when the index is on a character field
#*concatenated with a STR'ed numeric field the index breaks down.  I have also
#*determined that if I use APPEND instead of APPEND BLANK the indexing works
#*properly whichever field types I have.
#*
#*	Has anyone else ever experienced a similar problem?  What have you
#*done about it?  I assume that I can just turn the item_no field into a
#*character field and convert it back and forth, but that seems silly.  I
#*welcome any better suggestions.  Thanks.
#*
#*-- 
#*Paul Neubauer         neubauer@bsu-cs.bsu.edu        neubauer@bsu-cs.UUCP
#*                      <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!neubauer

Check your manual on this, but I suspect you may be having a
problem with STR defaults because you don't specify the length
or number of decimal points of your output string, such
as STR(item_no,5,0). So if you expect to get all digits, it's
possible that there are spaces and periods embedded which
interfere with indexing as you intend.

Steve Goldfield