>Does that work the other way, a dbf created by Database Desktop not
openable
>in Access as I think I have seen that before? I will check whether it was
>created in Foxpro but the app is a DOS one, did Foxpro for 3.1 exist?
Foxpro has been around since the days of DOS 3.3 (or thereabouts - ie: pre
Windows) so it could easily be an old version.
The DBase header record has a single byte in it (somewhere in the first few
bytes from memory) which indicates the application which created it and the
version. This causes no end of problems because few of the applications that
read these files are prepared to accept more than one or two of these
varients even though there's no difference between the dbf file structures
themselves. Almost all the variations in the Dbase system revolve around
index and memo files, both of which are external to the dbf file. For some
reason however, the creators of other DB products make a point of rejecting
dbf's that have indexes they can't read instead of saying "sure, we can read
your data, but we'll have to create our own index for it - Ok ?" (which is
about all the problem boils down to). The BDE won't read dbfs created in
Clipper for example, but it (and everything else) will hapily read dbfs
written in Dbase 3. And in almost every case, the difference is a single
byte in the file header. Go figure.
If you get really stuck, I have all the file structure stuff in a couple of
books at home.
Simon Mahony,
MetService.
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