Someone said I could access FoxPro-type indices. What
is the difference between FoxPro indices and CA-Clipper indices?
What gain can I get from doing that, and how?
First off, there are several advantages to using a FoxPro-like
index scheme.
.CDX files can contain more than one "tag," each of which relates
to an index key. Therefore you can drop all your many CA-Clipper
.NTX files by converting each to a "tag" within a single .CDX file.
This also lets you always open a file with USE <file> INDEX <file>
with assurance that you got all the tags. Better still, when
you perform a plain USE <file>, the driver will automatically
find and open a corresponding .CDX file with the same base name
as the datafile.
Replaceable Database Drivers which support FoxPro-like files are:
* The SIx Driver by Successware
* Comix by Loadstone
* The DBFCDX driver already included in CA-Clipper 5.2e
* The DBFCDX driver in CA-Clipper 5.3 *is* Comix.
SIx itself does not give you Rushmore lookups, but it is shipped
with an add-in called MACH which does. Likewise Comix has an
accompanying library called ClipMore which does the same thing.