Wrapping up Southwest Fox

We spent the last four days at Southwest Fox in Phoenix Arizona. It is the only FoxPro show in North America and this is our second year attending the conference. The show packs a lot of content into the four days with every session presented twice along with vendor sessions. There was even some pre-conference sessions this year.

Doug Hennig taught a session on using FoxPro and Advantage which was really well attended. I attended Doug’s session and I thought it was very well done. It is always good to see the community opinion of Advantage. I listed some of the highlights from the session below.

• Indexes involved in relations need to have the .NOT.DELETED() condition. Doug wrote a program which automatically adds this condition to indexes involved in relations which is very useful.
• If you add a full text search (content) index to a VFP table it will show up as invalid when you try to open it natively in FoxPro. However, the index can be added to a second CDX file allowing Advantage to use the index and allow the table to be used natively with FoxPro as well. The second CDX will be associated with the table in the Data Dictionary. You should use the Fixed or NotMaintained option since FoxPro applications will not be updating the index. You will need to do a reindex with Advantage to update the content index.
• FoxPro allows expressions to be used for field validation rules. Advantage has a Default Value, Maximum and Minimum values for fields. However, you can use expressions as a Record Level constraint which can provide the same functionality. You define the validation expression on the Table Properties tab of the Table Properties dialog in ARC.

J.D. Mullin also attended the conference and went to some of the sessions. You can read his thoughts on the Retrofitting Client Server session on his blog.