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

Attaching File to record:

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

    Attaching File to record:

    I need to attach non Alpha files (pdf, excel, jpg...) to records in an emb browse. The 2 approaches I know of are:
    1) use a character field to store the path and file name. The result is a long string of characters in the field in the emb browse like C:\Reports\.....etc....
    2) use an OLE field where the only thing that appears in the emb browse is <OLE> which gives no indication what file is attached.
    Question: is there a way to show the name of the file only like (SalesReportJune08) with perhaps the file type (like Excel, or pdf) instead of a long string of characters or just <OLE>?
    Tags: None
    #2
    Re: Attaching File to record:

    Have two fields in your file...

    1. Just the filename.ext
    2. Either the full path and filename or just the path (you can put it together with the filename with you need it - I usually just store the full path and name)

    Use file.filename_parse() to get all the parts you need.

    Have both fields in your browse, but only show the filename.ext.

    Comment

      #3
      Re: Attaching File to record:

      Exactly it, thanks David

      Comment

        #4
        Re: Attaching File to record:

        This approach does work but I wonder about the limits under A5. I developed such a thing under Access several years back. The information that needed to be in the database was a path to the original scan of information, saved in pdf format. It worked great but after about 1400 records of information with the appropriate paths for all the records, Access would not accept any more information. I had reached a limit that was not discussed anywhere in the documentation.

        I wonder if A5 has any such limits.

        Update: In the help file, search for database limit and then find Database
        Specifications.
        Last edited by WayneS; 08-09-2009, 10:05 PM. Reason: Update

        Comment

          #5
          Re: Attaching File to record:

          Thanks for the heads up, Wayne. The help file is not very explicit in this regard; the specs I found was 2 billion records max with a max of 19kb per record. Assuming on average 100kb per file attached, in theory there shouldn't be no problem with a few thousand records, I am just speculating.

          Comment

            #6
            Re: Attaching File to record:

            The maximum size of a dbf file is 2GB. At roughly 100 Kb per usual black and white PDF page, that's about 20,000 pages. If you need to store more than that, either you can keep the files as native Windows files and just keep the path information in A5, or else you can store the files as BLOBs in a SQL backend.

            Comment

              #7
              Re: Attaching File to record:

              Thanks for the clarification DR Wayne; 20,000 pages is way above my needs. Good to know.

              Comment

                #8
                Re: Attaching File to record:

                This arithmetic does not apply here. You are not loading the files into alpha; you are simply entering their paths in a character field. Whether the file itself is 10KB or quadrillion, it makes no difference.

                Same principle as referencing an image or a memo field.

                Comment

                Previous template Next
                Working...
                X