I have a .dbf table that i want to sort programatically in C#, I want to sort the content in the table itself. I need to do this because the software that uses it works better when the table is sorted correctly.
How can I do this in a fast and clean way?
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PS of course, the obvious solution is to use one of the standard C++ routines. There are any number of references available through Google - for example, see http://www.uow.edu.au/~luk
The only solution is to rewrite the whole DBF, which is never a fast way. It's clean but quite useless to really sort physical. The normal way is to create indexes, but that doesn't mean a third party software will use that index, so I understand this is your only way to have the data in a certain order in that third party software.
So, is there really no contact to the original programmer? No sources available?
It's a rather clean way to rewrite a dbf in general. But if you don't know what you're doing this can be very dirt:If you simply create a new dbf you may break the software, especially if it's a dbf of a dbc and you recreate a new free dbf or fox2.6 dbf with excel. Surely not the way to go.
Bye, Olaf.
Thanks for the answers, using Excel (or any other software) is not an alternative. The dbf tables are configuration tables for a SCADA system called Citect SCADA, I want to be able to create the tables based on a setup database we have.
When I start the process to create the tables based on our setup database, I copy blank tables made by Citect SCADA and just add rows to them. One solution could be to save the data in datasets first, then write to the .dbf tables in the correct order... But I would preffer a way to sort them (some of the tables also contains predefined data)
If you want to do this work in Visual Foxpro/Foxpro we can most certainly provide you with suggestions to help you.
But if you want to do this work in another language such as C# or another non-VFP application, then posting your question to this language-specific forum might not be your best choice.
You can always access the DBF file contents via ODBC, ADO or some other manner.
Good Luck
Well, as sais, the only way to physically sort it, is write to an empty dbf. The two standard ways to sort data are of course SQL with an ORDER BY and an INDEX. But SQL-Select do not change the DBF but create a new (temp) one and an INDEX may be fine, but if Citect SCADA is not programmed to use that index it will just be an additional index not used in any way, eg you can't define an INDEX that will always be used as the default, when a DBF is used by foxpro.
Of course if you have empty dbfs your idea to write to them in the order you want is the easiest choice.
To work on dbfs with predefined data you can still create an empty DBF by a ZAP of a copy. If needed you can of course copy the whole foxpro database and zap individual tables you need empty.
Aside of that you could simply use UPDATE-SQLs to update existing records to the data you want in that position, by simply selecting SELECT *, Recno() as Recno From Table into a dataset, sorting as you want, you know which recno will need which new physical recno and then update accordingly.
Bye, Olaf.
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by: pcelbaPosted on 2009-10-30 at 01:36:16ID: 25700977
Either sort the table in Visual FoxPro or create new sorted table in C#.
How do you access DBF data from C#? ODBC, OLE DB, Automation? Do you have VFP available?