Could you point the better way to mantain long texts vinculated to a VFP line register?

Hi Pcelba

I'm planning to introduce a feature like "Medical records" in the app - linked to every record.

Before  to start developing I asked the options.

Your reply looks very complete, I'm going to check...

From my days of working in and around the medical industry I saw that many (if not most) of the Medical Records and Medical Notes needed could be 'standardized' in some manner.   In fact it was such that even voice recognition could be used to 'short cut' the entry of various descriptions into the record.
For example:
   Just speak:   "Blood Pressure Normal"
   Then the System would key off of that phrase to enter a full paragraph of 'standardized' text into the record.
    If the 'key' phrase were in a table along with its associated paragraph, the user would not need to enter it and the paragraph would not need to be in the VF{ Memo file.

If that were to be the situation in your case, you could create a table of 'standardized' entries - each might be a paragraph of description, etc. - and then enable the user to select from them.

And for those instances where the needs exceeded using the 'standardized' medical descriptions, the user would then enter by hand whatever notes they wanted.

If that worked for you, it would diminish the size of the VFP Memo file since only the free-hand notes would go there and still give good recording capability for medical record keeping.

Also keep in mind that for year-after-year of medical recordings, you will need to ensure the integrity of the data.   So BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP regularly.

Good Luck

Hi jrbbldr

Thank you for your concerns.
A kind of "Medical Records" is just for  a reference on what is needed, the annotations would be much less technical.

I'm trying to use
http://yousfi.over-blog.com/2015/02/a-vfp-html-richtext-editor.html
It looks to fit my needs.

But I'm having dificulties in configure a DLL - so I started another question

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/29023008/Could-you-point-how-to-correctly-install-a-MSCOMDLG-component-to-run-in-VFP.html

Could you give a look?

Please disconsider the last post... I found a way.

I get it done by using this option:

http://yousfi.over-blog.com/2015/02/a-vfp-html-richtext-editor.html

When a user create , edit a text  and then save it ,

 Acordingly to this very schematic approach:

So it will be vinculated with the register. And then when the user needs the retrieve the text, just clicks  the open button.

If we are talking about medical records then the first thing which must be solved is the data security. Simply said stolen disk must not contain readable sensitive data... and even inside one organization must exist strict rules who can access certain info. This is valid for USA and Europe. I am not sure about Brasil but if it is not valid now then it will come soon...

It is good to hear you've found Rich text control which fits your needs. Just one note when looking at above images:  Do not store absolute path together with filename. Store just the name or relative path and the rest must be at one place in the app configuration. This way you may port the data much easier.

Hi Pcelba

The question is replied and the feature almost implemented.
Thank you for your concerns.
Yes, this reports (not exactly Medical records) may have sensitive contents.
I guess you are suggesting to encrypt the content, so I'm oppening another question in this subject.

Thanks for another outstanding solution!