Freechain errors

[Bob Stockler]

Don Coleman wrote (on Tue, Dec 26, 2006 at 02:38:23PM -0500):

| Yes, this application starts in add records mode and then uses lookup - to
| move to the desired record.  Their file may have 40,000+ records and at the
| beginning of the day only ~5,000 will be used, the remainder are now "free";
| created by an archive process that copies the completed records to a
| look-alike mirror file.  I seem to have many more freechain rebuilds taking
| place as the file grows.  I'm assuming the file grows because the app. does
| not see the "free" records and instead takes/creates new records.  Of course
| I may have a complete misunderstanding of the freechain application.

Create an Alien filePro File that has as its "real" file the
"key" file of the filePro File of interest.

Make the first field of the Alien file be length 20, edit * and
add additional fields of length < 999, edit * to make the Alien
file's record length to be the filePro record length + 20 of the
file of interest.

Write a processing table in the Alien file that goes through the 
file in record number order.

Use filePro I/O to write a file named "new.key" (or use export
ascii -x if you're more familiar with export).

Write the 1st record to "new.key".

Skip any records where 2 { 3 { 4 ... { n eq "" (where n is the
number of field in the Alien file) - they will be empty records.

Write all other records to "new.key".

After all records have been processed, write an empty record to
be the final record in "new.key".

Move "key" to "old.key", move "new.key" to "key".

Run 'freechain' on the file of interest and rebuild its indexes.

This will truly "scrunch" your file to be its minimum size.

Bob

-- 
Bob Stockler  +-+  bob at trebor.iglou.com  +-+  http://members.iglou.com/trebor