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PROGRAM: PARADUMP.EXE version 1.05 Copyright (c) 1992 by Thomas A. Lundin. All Rights Reserved. DESCRIPTION: Paradox Data Export Program RELEASE DATE: 7/18/92 AUTHOR: Thomas A. Lundin 16267 Husdon Avenue Lakeville, MN 55044 PHONE: (612) 588-7571 (8am-5pm Central, weekdays) (612) 431-5805 (nights and weekends) REGISTRATION: $25 per copy (site licenses available) ABSTRACT: PARADUMP is a stand-alone program which exports Paradox 3.0/3.5 database tables into any of five different formats: fixed-length fielded ASCII, comma/quote-delimited ASCII, comma-delimited ASCII, tab-delimited ASCII, and WordPerfect 5.1 secondary merge format. REVISION HISTORY: 1.05 7/18/92 Fixed bug for alpha fields >127 characters 1.04 6/30/92 Fixed bug for >32K records 1.03 6/9/92 Added output count, redirected structure output 1.02 5/25/92 First shareware release PARADUMP.EXE is distributed as shareware. It is not free software. If you continue to use this program beyond a 30-day trial period, you are required to register it. The registration fee for this version is $25 per copy. Upon registration, you will receive the most recent version of the program without the compliance message. Make checks payable to Thomas A. Lundin (U.S. funds and drawable at a U.S. bank). Please send your registrations to: Thomas A. Lundin 16267 Hudson Avenue Lakeville, MN 55044 The registration fee for PARADUMP on network file servers is a $50 flat charge for up to 20 workstations PER SERVER, and a $100 flat charge for unlimited (over 20) workstations PER SERVER. I welcome suggestions and comments regarding PARADUMP.EXE. The suggestions of registered users will always be considered first. Please respect the tenets of shareware and register if you intend to use the program beyond the trial period. It is my policy to not add features to the program on the promise of registration, so if you are not a registered user, please do not ask me to change the program to suit your needs. Program bugs are a different story. I will investigate reported bugs from any user and will attempt to fix those within my control. DISCLAIMER. This program and its associated documentation are provided AS IS, without any express or implied warranty. The program is not warranted as to suitability or fitness for any particular purpose. The author and/or distributor of this program shall not be held liable for any perceived or real damages emanating from the use or misuse of this program. The user of this program understands that operation of this program is undertaken at the user's own risk. INTRODUCTION. The impetus for writing PARADUMP came out of my frustration at trying to export a fixed-length ASCII file from a Paradox 3.5 data table. The only method prescribed by Borland was to create a Paradox report specification and output the report to disk. So I tried that, and two problems became immediately apparent: 1) outputting from a report was tediously S-L-O-W, and 2) the last field of a fixed-length record wasn't padded to its full field width. This meant that I had to put a dummy field at the end of each record to ensure that the last Paradox field would be padded out. All of this rigmarole for each table (creating a report specification, placing a dummy field, outputting to disk) was too much for me to bear, especially when compounded by the exorbitantly slow output times. It was actually much faster to use the ASCII Delimited Export command sequence in the Tools menu, and to run the exported file through a file filter that padded the variable- length ASCII fields back to a fixed-length form, but this wasn't exactly an elegant long-term solution. The other option I was offered was to purchase the Paradox Database Engine for $99, which seemed like overkill for what should have been an atomic Paradox operation in the first place, and besides, I've seen programs written with the Engine, and they seem incredibly bloated for what they do. Nobody at Borland wanted to provide me with any hints on the Paradox table structure (as if that information was somehow Restricted For Reasons Of National Security), so I spent a couple of weeks reverse-engineering it and writing this program in my spare time. PARADUMP does exactly what I wanted it to do: reads a Paradox table and creates a fixed-length ASCII file from it, in one step. The performance of PARADUMP is roughly the same as the ASCII export command in Paradox, which I find quite acceptable, and in any case infinitely better than Report. A record layout for the converted ASCII file is generated in a file named PARADUMP.STR. (A record layout is critical if you expect someone else to import the fixed-length data into another program.) Once the code base was complete, it was a simple matter to extend the conversion process to allow export into several other transfer formats. This facility should allow Paradox files to be exported for use with most other word processing and database programs. PARADUMP.DOC REV. 7/18/92 PAGE 2 USING THE PROGRAM. The program is command-line driven. The form of the command line is: paradump PDOXTBL.DB OUTPUTFILE.EXT [Pn[,n,n...]] [On] [Dn] where: PDOXTBL.DB is the name of the Paradox file to be exported. OUTPUTFILE.EXT is the name to give the exported file. Pn... is an optional format for specifying the number of decimal places to show in NUMERIC fields. The 'n' represents a numeric value. More on this later. On is an optional switch for specifying the type of output file to create. The 'n' represents a numeric value. More on this later. Dn is an optional switch for specifying the number of digits a year will occupy. The 'n' represents a numeric value. More on this later. The default action (where none of the optional switches is selected) is as follows: The exported file is a fixed-length ASCII text file. Fields are padded where necessary to full width and records are terminated with a carriage return/line feed. Alpha fields are padded with spaces to full width, left aligned. Numeric fields are output in a 17-character text field, right aligned. 15 significant digits are expressed. Decimal alignment does not occur; as many decimal places as are needed will be output in the field, and this may vary from record to record. Dates are output as alphanumeric fields in the form MM/DD/YYYY, (10 characters). Short fields are output to 6 digits, right aligned. Dollar fields are output in a 17-character text field, right aligned, including two decimal places. 15 significant digits are expressed. PARADUMP does not recognize primary or secondary indexes. The data records are exported in physical (unindexed) order. When a Paradox table is exported using PARADUMP, an ASCII file with the same name as your output file but with an extension of .STR is created (so don't use an extension of .STR in your output filename). This file contains a listing of the exported table structure. The listing includes the field name, the type of field being exported, and the width of the field (if a variable-length output option is selected, the field width indicates the maximum number of characters allowed in the field). Numeric and dollar fields are always 17 characters wide, but numeric fields can have a variable number of digits after the decimal point. The number of decimal places is shown in parentheses following the field width. A decimal place value of -1 PARADUMP.DOC REV. 7/18/92 PAGE 3 means that the decimal point floats (that is, it appears in whatever position is natural for the numeric value stored in the field). You can specify a fixed number of decimal places with the P option, explained below. ALTERNATE OUTPUT OPTIONS. 1. CHANGING THE OUTPUT FILE TYPE (the O option). PARADUMP has the ability to output to several other file types by setting the O option (letter Oh, not numeral Zero). The following options are available: O1 - comma/quote-delimited ASCII. Fields are output as variable- length text. Each field is surrounded by quote marks, fields are separated from one another by a comma. Records are terminated by a carriage return/line feed. O2 - tab-delimited ASCII. Fields are output as variable-length text. Fields are separated from one another by a tab character (ASCII 9). Records are terminated by a carriage return/line feed. O3 - WordPerfect 5.1 secondary merge. Fields are output as variable-length text. Fields are separated from one another by a control-R (ASCII 18) and a carriage return/line feed. Records are terminated by a control-E (ASCII 5) and a carriage return/line feed. O4 - comma-delimited ASCII. This is the same as option O1, except numeric and dollar fields are not surrounded by quote marks, so they can be distinguished from text fields. This format is used largely for importing into Lotus 1-2-3 or other spreadsheet programs. 2. CHANGING THE DATE FORMAT (the D option). Dates in PARADUMP are output as text strings in MM/DD/YYYY format by default. You can output dates as MM/DD/YY by setting the D option to D2. Since a 2-digit year can't differentiate between centuries, you'd want to be sure that all of your dates fall within the same century if you choose D2. 3. SPECIFYING DECIMAL PLACES (the P option). Numeric fields by default are output with a floating decimal point within a 17-character text field, right aligned (15 significant digits are expressed); this means that whole numbers will be output with no decimal point at all, and fractional numbers will be output to as many decimal places as required. There are instances, however, when it is desirable to align the decimal points in a field; this requires a fixed number of decimal places to be output. The P option allows you to set the number of decimal places for each numeric field, in a range from 0 to 7, or specify a floating decimal point. PARADUMP.DOC REV. 7/18/92 PAGE 4 The format of the P option is: Pn,n,n,n,n,n... where each 'n' is a number representing the number of decimal places to carry in the field. If you use the P option, you must specify a value (even if it is a BLANK value) for each and every field in the table. If your table contains 10 fields (even if some of them are Alpha fields), you must have 10 values in the P option. Of course, it is meaningless to assign a decimal place value for an Alpha field, but a comma must be used as a field placeholder anyway. For instance, assume that your table contains five fields of the following types: Alpha, Numeric, Numeric, Alpha, Dollar. Let's say you wanted the first numeric field to be output to 3 decimal places, and the second numeric field to be output to 0 decimal places. The P option would look like this: P,3,0,, The first value is a blank placeholder for the Alpha field, the second value is a 3, the third value is a 0, the fourth value is a blank placeholder, and the fifth value is a blank placeholder. You could also enter any number instead of a blank placeholder; a decimal place value will be ignored for non-numeric fields. For instance, this P option line: P8,3,0,1,1 would have the same effect as the previous one, since only the second and third fields in the Paradox table are Numeric fields. (Remember that Dollar fields are always output to two decimal places.) A value of -1 is used to indicate a floating decimal point (which is the default). Thus, you can mix fixed-place decimals with floating-place decimals in the same record. IMPORTANT NOTE! The P option has a special characteristic that affects all numeric fields: THE LAST SPECIFIED VALUE IN THE P OPTION WILL AFFECT ALL SUBSEQUENT NUMERIC FIELDS. For instance, if you had a P option that looked like this: P4 ...every numeric field in the table would be output to four decimal places. As another example, assume you have a Paradox table that has fields of the following types: Alpha, Alpha, Numeric, Date, Numeric, Numeric, Numeric, Numeric, Numeric. If you had a P option that looked like this: PARADUMP.DOC REV. 7/18/92 PAGE 5 P,,2,,3 ...the first Numeric field would be output to two decimal places, and the second and all subsequent Numeric fields would be output to three decimal places. If we change the P option to this: P,,2,,3,-1 ...the first and second Numeric fields will be output to two and three decimal places, respectively, and the third and subsequent numeric fields will be output with a floating decimal point. Try experimenting with the P option. Play around with different P values to get a good idea of how the P option affects your output. PARADUMP.DOC REV. 7/18/92 PAGE 6 REGISTRATION FORM DATE: ________________________ NAME: __________________________________________________________________ COMPANY: _______________________________________________________________ ADDRESS: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ CITY: _______________________________ STATE: _______ ZIP: _____________ PHONE: _____________________________ FAX: ______________________________ FEE SCHEDULE QTY AMOUNT REGISTRATION FOR PARADUMP 1.05 @ $25 PER COPY ________ x $25 = _________ SITE LICENSE FOR STAND-ALONE UNITS 5 - 10 UNITS @ $15 PER COPY ________ x $15 = _________ 11 - 20 UNITS @ $10 PER COPY ________ x $10 = _________ OVER 20 UNITS @ $5 PER COPY ________ x $ 5 = _________ NETWORK FILE SERVER REGISTRATION <=20 WORKSTATIONS @ $50/FILE SERVER ________ x $50 = _________ >20 WORKSTATIONS @ $100/FILE SERVER ________ x $100= _________ SHIPPING AND HANDLING (INDICATE ANY THAT APPLY) (For single copies only; call for S/H on multiple copies) FIRST CLASS MAIL ___$5.00_ UPS GROUND ____7.50_ OVERNIGHT DELIVERY ___20.00_ C.O.D. ADD ____7.50_ TOTAL ________ _________ Send this form with payment to: Thomas A. Lundin 16267 Hudson Avenue Lakeville, MN 55044 Payment terms are Prepaid or C.O.D. Corporate purchase orders accepted from Fortune 1000 firms only. PARADUMP.DOC REV. 7/18/92 PAGE 7