Memo vs. Long Character Field

[johngtatp]

I have become quite paranoid using memo fields and I am redesigning an old app.

I originally had a flat file type dbase that had about 15 long character fields 200-300 characters and only 2 or 3 were customarily used in each record (all different, not the same 2-3), which left the .dbf records fairly large. I am only dealing with about 10,000 records but I would like to speed things up and hopefully smaller file size would help. I am redesigning to have child records that still need to have a long field, however now there will only be 2 or 3 records attached as children with the long character files instead of having all of the non used fields in the original table.

So my theoretical question is: Having a single record and with a field needing to type a maximum of 300 characters, but usually its only 30-40 characters, would it be safer to just do a large character field, or have a memo field instead? Your experience and thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[DaveM]

Re: Memo vs. Long Character Field

Character fields only can hold 255 characters and 1 always seems to get lost.
Memo fields can hold whatever you need(pretty much)
All memo fields in a table wind up in one .fpt file for the whole table. Lots of memo fields can make the fpt file real big quick.

If I were doing this and going to use memo fields:
1. one or 2 memo fields in separate connected tables(set). (Maybe 2 per table if you have a lot)
2. Create a variable for the user to type into and then save that to the memo field
3. They would be RTF memo fields - seems to be stronger
4. Use Pure Text(application) for any copy paste operations so users don't copy garbage into the memo that can hurt it.

[johngtatp]

Re: Memo vs. Long Character Field

Dave,

Thanks, lets say there is only one memo field per table. Easy to read the memo into a variable and then open an xdialog to edit. How would you programmatically recommend writing it to the field. I have not worked much with RTF fields. Would you just write the value i.e. field.value=variable then save the record, or is there a safer way?

[DaveM]

Re: Memo vs. Long Character Field

A good start is here:
http://wiki.alphasoftware.com/INSERT..._MEMO+Function

[Ronald Anusiewicz]

Re: Memo vs. Long Character Field

Here's something else to look at.
http://wiki.alphasoftware.com/A5_MEM...a5_memo_editor