Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook
Devcon 2020 Goes Virtual! LEARN MORE >

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Possible corrupt DBF table or dictionary?

Collapse
X
Collapse
 
  • Page of 1
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
Previous template Next
    #1

    Possible corrupt DBF table or dictionary?

    It does not seem like a case of corruption, but I don't know what it IS.

    A client's database went south today while they were using it. About 50 dbf tables. I found about 2/3 of the tables to either do "nothing" when trying to edit a record, or to cause A5 to crash. I was starting to test with a dbf recovery tool, but then found this...

    If I remove the table's dictionary, then records can be edited.
    If I copy just the dbf & cdx to my development database (and use dictionary in development database) then I can edit records.
    If I copy the dictionary files from dev. database to client database (using dbf & cdx from client) then I can't edit records.

    I copied the adb and al? files from development to client, still can't edit.
    Removed master password. Still can't edit.

    For this client I don't use AEX, just copy all dictionaries from development to their folder. So it is puzzling why a client table can be copied to development and work, but it does not work in client folder - even after copied to my development machine.

    Some of these tables are lookup tables and have not changed in years. There are also 6 folders on the client's system with the same database app, and all of them developed the same problem at about the same time. Even a test database that had not been open in 6 months had the problem.

    So I suspected malware/virus. Malwarebytes and MS Security Essentials have found nothing. So far I don't "think" any other of my development databases have contracted the problem after copying the client database to my machine.

    At this point I am stumped.

    Bill.
    Tags: None
    #2
    Re: Possible corrupt DBF table or dictionary?

    Oops. I This should have been in the desktop section.

    The problem turned out to be the Cryptolocker trojan. Fortunately there are backups. Unfortunately the encryption process started about 1/2 hour before the next 12 hour backup. Could have been much worse.

    Bill.
    Last edited by Al Buchholz; 05-09-2014, 10:02 PM. Reason: moved

    Comment

      #3
      Re: Possible corrupt DBF table or dictionary?

      Good news - sounds like you were lucky you didn't get the virus if you downloaded their data back to your computer.
      Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
      972 524 8714
      [email protected]

      ____________________
      "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

      Comment

        #4
        Re: Possible corrupt DBF table or dictionary?

        How did you detect it?. Its concerning that MS Security essentials didn't

        Comment

          #5
          Re: Possible corrupt DBF table or dictionary?

          Martin, I am still cautious. I have a bad spot on the system hard drive, so I will likely rebuild that PC this weekend anyway.

          Ray, I found a file, Decrypt_Instructions.html & ....txt. Later the folks on site found the PC that was ground 0, which did have a pop-up message about paying.

          Comment

            #6
            Re: Possible corrupt DBF table or dictionary?

            This is the same ol' cat and mouse game.
            Anti-virus by default is reactionary (they need to see the virus to defend against it).
            Once those new definitions are pushed to clients, the virus writer re-works their code.

            The obvious best solution is for end users to use some common sense and precautions
            before clicking on attachments or links in email.
            Gregg
            https://paiza.io is a great site to test and share sql code

            Comment

            Previous template Next
            Working...
            X