What Does Matter ?

Have your ever needed to connect to foxpro databases ?

Hopefully not , but sometimes you need , and the last day I needed.

Well you can easily OleDb classes defined in System.Data.OleDb namespace

to connecting and working with your database

But beforehand you need to installVisual FoxPro Ole DB Provider , you can get it from here

Well now its easy to connect to you dbf file with OleDbCommand and OleDbConnection and … dont forget to specify that you are using foxpro in your connection string , a simple connection string would be

Provider=vfpoledb.1;Data Source=C:\db\

c:\db\ is where your database file resides, but be careful that if you have a database file called mydb.dbf and its in c:\db\ then if you wanna get all rows of it you should just put database file location in connection string and database file name itself is a table name so in OleDbCommand we write

select * from mydb

now you can do whatever you want with your database

but just memo field in foxpro needs a trick

you can easily set any value to your memo field , but that value must be lower than 255 character

and we all know that Memo fields are limited only by the amount of available disk space so its a lot bigger than 255 character

the workaround is dividing your value into 255 charactered values.

I mean that “update mydb set memofield = ‘ string with more than 255 character ‘” wouldnt work but if you divide string into 255 charactered values like this “update mydb set memofield = ‘ string with 255 character ‘ + ‘ string with 255 character ‘ + ‘ string with 255 character ‘ ”

it would work

here is a sample code in c# , it gets all rows of mydb database

 var oConn = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=vfpoledb.1;Data Source=C:\db\");
 oConn.Open();

 using (var oCom = new OleDbCommand("select * from mydb", oConn))
 {
 var oReader =  oCom.ExecuteReader();
 
 while(oReader.Read())
 {
 // do what you wanna do !
 }
 
 }
 oConn.Close();

well , till next time