Wow, that brings back some old memories. I now remember that I have
encountered this problem before and I ended up writing some code that
changed that byte to something else, if problems were encountered with DBF
files, then reindexing them.
I can't remember which byte or what I changed it too. But I do remember
that I did it and it worked.
Nahum
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Mahony [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Monday, 8 May 2000 11:23
> To: Multiple recipients of list delphi
> Subject: Re: [DUG]: Dbf corruption
>
>
> >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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