From: bill@bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion)
Subject: Re: Importing ascii files to Profile 16
Organization: W. J. Vermillion - Winter Park, FL
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 19:28:30 GMT
Keywords: Xenix 6000 Profile 16

In article <1993Jan8.014534.12066@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> sscrivan@nyx.cs.du.edu (steve scrivano) writes:
>
>I wonder if anyone has developed a utility that will read ascii files
>into Profile 16 or perhaps construct a "key" file from an ascii file.

If you are talking about automatic reconstruction you aren't going to
find it.         

>Profile 16 runs under Xenix on Models 16/6000.

It's real name anymore is filePro, and it runs on Suns, VAXes, VMS
machines, AIX, 386/486 SysVs and a couple of more.   Goes for $495 from
DOS to $40,000 for a 256 user VMS.       I converted the last of my old
Profile users out a couple of years ago.

>Such a utility would be
>useful because ascii data that is created on variety of other machines
>including portable lap tops, etc., could be easily imported into your
>main Profile 16 database.  Any ascii file with a standard number of fields
>per record and standard field delimiters in my opinion should be able to
>be imported into Profile 16.

Most serious data bases don't user field delimeters and use fixed
length fields.  Much faster access that way.   So you have to know the
field lengths to be able to bring it into filePro.    Once you know
that, it is a snap.    

A recent import I did of 37,000+ names for a local candidate was an
xfer from IBM mainframe, to a DOS format, and then just copied them in
as a 'foreign' file instead of filePro.    Biggest time waster was the
doscp command - it is slow.  Rest was fairly quick.   Data in and out
of FP is quite common for me.

And I have a set up at a local community college where things are
downloaded from a Burroughs mainframe, with a database called LINK, and
loaded into FP.    Data is massaged and them uploaded back to the
Burroughs.

The only semi-difficult ones were converting dbase .DBF files >before<
I had the dbcopy utility.     That took a bit of diddling, but a small
data base could be manually converted in an hour or two.  Biggest
problem was getting past the headers in the .DBF.

If you have dbcopy, it will read a .DBF file and do all the conversion
for you including setting up the fields and lenghts.  Quick and easy.

>There are a number of uses for such a 
>utility.  Imagine scanning bar codes on another machine to create an
>ascii file or using a serial card reader to import ascii text, or leaving
>your office with a laptop to do some work and being able to upload it
>to your main machine later.  Or, perhaps you want to run a company bbs
>that allows customers to place their own orders with some other ascii
>based database maker that doesn't require all of the termcap definitions
>that Profile 16 does and be able to import that data later.

All that is eminently do-able. You just can't have a program read the
database and construct a filePro key file for you from that.

Current versions are so easy to import to and from - if you haven't
seen a version 4.1 filePro running and have a chance to program in it,
you are missing a lot, and doing too much hard work.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bill@bilver.oau.org  bill@bilver.uucp
                - ..!{peora|tous|tarpit}!bilver!bill