Database development and training for Birmingham and the midlands
Specialists in Microsoft Access and Visual Foxpro database training and development
I am happy to hear from existing clients but I am taking no new calls.
March 2015
I have now retired and am taking on no new work. I'd like to thank all our customers over the past 20 years. It really has been a most enjoyable time.
Visual FoxPro and Lotus Approach
Lotus Approach may not be as popular as it once was but there are still many systems in use. We have just had to create a tool that would link Approach tables on a PC with a new shared database on a web server.
The data on the web was held in Access 2000 format so our first thought was to use Visual Basic for the links. Reading Approach through ODBC proved awkward so we decided to use Visual FoxPro instead. This may sound an odd choice but Approach stores its data in dBase III tables and Fox can read and write these as a native format.
The only difficult aspect was that Approach presents the users with long field names but is restricted to the old ten-character limit in the dbf files themselves. The long field names are held in the .ADX file but we found it easier to write an external lookup table to do the conversion. This also allowed us to add descriptive comments for the user.
![[Slant Design]](../images/slant.gif "Home page of Slant Design")
This was another project on which Alvechurch Data collaborated with
Slant Design of Malvern. Slant used ADO.Net to build the user input
forms on the web page, Alvechurch Data designed and built the database
in Access XP and wrote the components for the upload and download of
Approach data.
