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What tools are available to edit (modify) the structure of an existing DBF, or even create a new DBF from scratch?

Say I needed to add a new field to a DBF table, or rename a field?

I'm envisioning there must be some type of a GUI visual designer, which is what exists in VFP IDE, but I'm not just talking about FoxPro DBFs, I mean any of the DBF types that an X# developer might need to work with?

Is there something native in X# platform, or is there an open-source designer, or will it be necessary to purchase a tool that does this?

Hi Matt,

this may be one of the shortcomings of VO: there was a DBF editor part of the IDE, but no separate tool. Some programmers used the old Clipper DBU, some a 3rd party tool.
I for myself had another solution: since I was not willing to adapt database structure changes on customer data manually, I had my database stricture defined in external DBF tables, and on program start the structure was checked and adapted by my program itself.
I'm adapting a similar logic also for SQL database because I think it is a better approach than manually do such changes - it is to easy to make an error or to forget something.
To maintain data, I have added a function in all my applications: I have simply to drop a DBF file onto the open application, and then the file is opened in a new browse window where I can do some changes.
For sure, a DBF database manager would be a welcome thing, but again this is something where I simply don't have the needed time.
For SQL databases, I use Navicat Premium Essentials, as it supports all databases I need (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, SQLite).
Wolfgang

I think there are a lot of 3rd party DBF editors out there. I was personally using "dbAdministrator" which was shipping together with VO2.6 I think.

Same here, was still able on Vista or 32bit systems to use DBU, just nothing compares to its speed doing DBF maintenance. It did not have a CDX driver, only NTX, but my applications all were able to do a ReIndex on first run if the CDX tables were not found. Did an update on indexed fields, no sweat, just drop all CDX tables and they gets recreated on First Application run.

DBAdmin was second choice, but moving to SQL soon made its use obsolete. It still have a DBA icon on my W10 64bit machine though, just in case...

What you need is cmVodbx32 by Jean Raymond. Still available at rayonline.com.

Nick

I´m using DBMax from Sven Ebert, but it seems that he´s out of business ? At least the link to his website doesn´t work no longer ...

www.ebertonline.de

Does anybody know what Sven is currently doing ?

regards
Karl-Heinz

I'm using Advantage Database Architect.
Version 11 can be downloaded here:
http://devzone.advantagedatabase.com/dz ... Platform=6
It can run in local or remote Server mode.

Version 12 is only available via your local ADS distrubitor.
It's shipped with Delphi sources (as I remember).

Regards,
Stefan

Hello Matt,

Erik Visser and Janno Hordijk created dbv and I have made considerable changes into the source code. It supports fast text search, ADS or non ADS databases and more and most things you need to do with databases but it urgently needs maintenance. E.g. the browser is still based on the default Cavo browser instead of the much more powerful bBrowser and if you press PgUp/PgDn to fast multiple times it shows only one of the records repeatedly over the whole page. We are in the process of converting it to X#, improve the working of some of the functions and replacing the browser (probably by the .Net databrowser) but it will take some time before it's finished

I can send you the program if you're still interested after the above words .

Dick

Thanks Dick... I'll wait for a release of the updated app after you give it a refresh. I don't actually need it myself, I was just probing around to see how a developer would tweak a FoxPro DBF if they do not own a copy of the FoxPro developer app.