Need a clever way to load all the qualifier names...

[Nancy Palmquist]

Mike Schwartz wrote:

>      I am writing some master reports that will need to access all the 
> available qualifiers and I need a clever solution that will let me read 
> in all of the qualifier names for a given file.  This is running in 
> filePro 5.0.06 on SCO Openserver.
> 
>  
> 
>     For example, in the "custmast" customer master file, and there are 
> qualifiers for each of the several dozen manufacturing plant locations; 
> IE the qualifiers are detroit, grnbay, omaha, etcetera, and I need to 
> load each of the qualifier names into a loop of lookup commands using 
> something like custmast@{qu where qu equals detroit, grnbay, omaha, etc.
> 
>  
> 
>      Opendir-nextdir commands work OK, but they are tedious to write and 
> there isn't a mask for qualifiers, so they tend to require a lot of disk 
> I/O.  (Some of the filePro files I am working with have hundreds of 
> files in them, mostly selects, like se.ltty230, sel.tty942,se.lpeteb, 
> etcetera that I have to weed through to find the key files.)  I am going 
> to have to do this for numerous reports, so I need something that is 
> simple to implement and runs as quickly as possible, because I am 
> feeding this data out to web browsers in response to sales rep queries, 
> so transaction time will be critical.  
> 
>  
> 
>      Wishlist:  Maybe I will submit something to the wishlist to request 
> a mask for qualifier names in the opendir command, but I don't know 
> whether that will speed the opendir command up very much…
> 
>  
> 
>      I can't depend on the file named "qualify" in each of the filePro 
> subdirs, because the key and data files might have been copied in from 
> another server, rather than built through the filePro main menu.  IE, 
> the "qualify" file is usually wrong or non-existant.  However, if any of 
> you have a script that can loop through all of the filePro 
> subdirectories and recreate the "qualify" file in each subdir, perhaps I 
> could run something like that as a "cron" job.   Actually, I could 
> probably do this from within filePro once a week or once a month using 
> OpenDir, but I would hate to miss any new locations in the interim.     
> (There are over 500 filePro files on about a dozen servers, so I would 
> rather not do this by hand…)
> 
>  
> 
>      There are dozens of filePro reports that I am going to have to 
> modify to become web transactions, so I am interested in any ideas or 
> scripts that any of you have developed to make this process more efficient.
> 
>  
> 
Mike,

I have exactly this programming done for searching prior years.  We 
archive by year.

The way I did it was to create a filePro data base called "qualyear".

It is never 'qualified'.  I add a record for each qualfier with the 
following fields:

Qualfier Code:  det
Description:	Detroit Branch
Sort:  (use this to create an order for the file to be processed)

Mine is for years so it looks like this:
Qualfier Code:  98
Description: Year 1998
Sort:  1998  - without this the 98 would be after the 03 qualfier 
instead of before.


Then I load that into a listbox or just read thru the records when I 
need to look at all files.

When they add a record to the qualyear file, it will create the new 
qualifier in all files that need it, and generate the new indexes. 
Quite a savings.

I have built this into a few of my applications.  Having a database 
makes it possible to allow the end user to select a qualfier in a 
listbox, run reports once for each qualfier, etc.

I use this in one of my classes so if you would like a sample of the 
code, let me know.
Nancy

-- 
Nancy Palmquist 		MOS & filePro Training Available
Virtual Software Systems	Web Based Training and Consulting	
PHONE: (412) 835-9417		   Web site:  http://www.vss3.com