Getting data out

[Brad Sparks]

I purchased the rights to an old dos app a couple of years ago and the data
base is written in b tree filer. I have a customer that has the app and
wants to get some data out of it. I have most of turbo power's products for
Delphi and I was wondering if their is a way to get it into a text file or
in to ff so I can work with the data?

[Stefan Andersson]

Hi!

The simple answere is yes.. if you have BTRee Filer and the record
description :-)

Go to the Foundry and download the package for Delphi, install it and write
your app to move it to FF or text or whatever..
just remember to declare the record as packed record and check the integer
fields for similar size... Real in BTree would be Real48 in Delphi if I
recall correct.

HTH,
Stefan

[Rob Roberts [TPX]]

Brad,

As Stefan mentioned, if you have B-Tree Filer, you could use it to write an
app that will extract the data from the old B-Tree Filer database. But you
can also do it without B-Tree Filer probably just as easily. (But as Stefan
also mentioned, you will need the original record declarations from the
source code. Without that, you will have a very hard time extracting the
data.)

Just open the file as a regular Pascal file of records, and then process it
sequentially, extracting the data from each record and writing it to a text
file, adding it to a SQL database, or whatever you want to do with it.
Ignore the first record (record #0) because it is a header record and does
not contain actual data. Assuming that the programmer who wrote the
application followed the standard recommendation of reserving the first four
bytes (i.e. - a longint) of every record for use by B-Tree Filer, you'll
want to examine that longint field and ignore any records that have non-zero
values there. A value of zero indicates a current, valid record, while a
non-zero value indicates a deleted record.

As Stefan also mentioned, you'll need to take care in dealing with
differences in data types and data alignment between Delphi and Borland
Pascal. For example, in BP integers are 2 bytes while in Delphi they are 4
bytes. You will want to change fields declared as integer in the original
DOS record layout to smallint in your new Delphi layout.

--Rob [TPX]