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

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

Some Advice Needed!

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    #16
    Re: Some Advice Needed!

    Wayne - good idea. I can use the following to test for a connection to a website:

    Code:
    DIM web_url as c
    web_url = "www.alphasoftware.com"
    
    result = hostavailable(web_url)
    
    if result = .F. then
        ui_msg_box("","File does not exist at "+web_url)  
    else
        ui_msg_box("","File Exists "+web_url)
    end if
    But I don't know how to test if a file_exists() on a website Any ideas?

    Tom

    Comment


      #17
      Re: Some Advice Needed!

      Do you run an ftp server on your site?

      I came across an idea today. Use FTP_GET_LIST() and parse the result for the desired file.
      There can be only one.

      Comment


        #18
        Re: Some Advice Needed!

        You can go further than that, set the download page up with a 3 wide table. Download stuff on left, center for notices and right collum for ads like google adsense.

        you might like to setup your opening form with an active x control that would point to your website page with update information. This would be presented before you start the program. The end user can view this page and then decide if they have the most current software by simply looking at the release date or version.
        This can also be done from an html file that always gets downloaded on start of app from the runtime.

        I can even make an exe(you can to) to start the runtime and app on the desktop.
        Dave Mason
        [email protected]
        Skype is dave.mason46

        Comment


          #19
          Re: Some Advice Needed!

          Great thread...but...Why do Dave, Ted, and Preston all have the same Avitar?
          Last edited by Mike Wilson; 03-01-2014, 09:14 AM.
          Mike W
          __________________________
          "I rebel in at least small things to express to the world that I have not completely surrendered"

          Comment


            #20
            Re: Some Advice Needed!

            Mike, take a look at;

            www.applicationallstars.com

            We are a group selling our software, sharing experiences and picking up work..
            See our Hybrid Option here;
            https://hybridapps.example-software.com/


            Apologies to anyone I haven't managed to upset yet.
            You are held in a queue and I will get to you soon.

            Comment


              #21
              Re: Some Advice Needed!

              Stan - I can't get ftp to work. What am I missing. Using the example in the docs and the code above I get the following.

              Code:
              DIM web_url as c
              web_url = "www.alphasoftware.com"
              
              result = hostavailable(web_url)
              
              if result = .F. then
                  ui_msg_box("","File does not exist at "+web_url)  
              else
                  ui_msg_box("","File Exists "+web_url)
              end if
              
              string = ftp_get_list(web_url, "alphadoc2", "@lph@5", "/products/review", .t.) 'www.alphasoftware.com"
              
              ui_msg_box("",string)
              Sorry if I'm hijacking this thread, but I find this topic very interesting.

              ~ Tom

              Comment


                #22
                Re: Some Advice Needed!

                We do??
                Originally posted by Mike Wilson View Post
                Great thread...but...Why do Dave, Ted, and Preston all have the same Avitar?
                Dave Mason
                [email protected]
                Skype is dave.mason46

                Comment


                  #23
                  Re: Some Advice Needed!

                  Originally posted by Tom Patten View Post
                  Sorry if I'm hijacking this thread, but I find this topic very interesting.

                  ~ Tom
                  Simple, start a new thread to talk about checking for a file on a website.

                  Comment


                    #24
                    Re: Some Advice Needed!

                    Tom, some of the later versions of windows have a way to map a drive via ftp and other, not just local computers. I am working on win8.1 right now and I think win7 has it.

                    No, I have not tackled it yet, but found it.

                    I would believe it to be a lot easier if the site is a disk drive letter.

                    Want to test that? http://www.smarterasp.net has a free small space that should work for testing. I would want a larger space for production though.
                    Last edited by DaveM; 03-01-2014, 01:21 PM.
                    Dave Mason
                    [email protected]
                    Skype is dave.mason46

                    Comment


                      #25
                      Re: Some Advice Needed!

                      Originally posted by Tom Patten View Post
                      I like this thread. Now you got me thinking of alternative ways to update an app from a website. But I don't how to check if a file exists on the internet.

                      How would the following need to be changed to check for a file on the web?

                      Code:
                      filename = "http://www.alphasoftware.com"
                      result = file.exists(filename)
                      if result = .F. then
                          ui_msg_box("","File does not exist. "filename)  
                      else
                          ui_msg_box("","File Exists")
                      end if
                      
                      END
                      Thanks ~ Tom

                      The answer on how to do it. http://forum.applicationallstars.com....php?f=19&t=64

                      Comment


                        #26
                        Re: Some Advice Needed!

                        Thought I'd give this a go on Google Drive to see what happens when 2 different users enter (for instance) a payment record at about the same time. As I suspected both records were given the same record ID.

                        I don't see any way this can be resolved if using Google Drive as there are multiple copies of both data and INDEX files (one on each PC plus the master database) which are not always fully synched.

                        Indeed, the conflict between the 2 entries I made was resolved by Google by overwriting the older file with the newest. One has to assume that as Google Drive is working at file level with any data that it doesn't understand that this will always be the case - I've not had an opportunity to see if there are any options to give the user the opportunity to resolve conflicts.

                        Great idea, but to allow multiple users update access would require a complete redesign of my app, probably using temporary tables to store any remote updates that could then be applied centrally when received during synch.

                        Would be worth looking for a similar service that doesn't cache the central data on the local PC to see if it works.

                        Comment


                          #27
                          Re: Some Advice Needed!

                          Without central data cache (ie no shadow DB) then all data would require referncing from the server - I would expect painfully slow with huge bandwidth.
                          I would imagine that updating would have to be constructed in the form of batch data updates (like with older accounting systems methodology) - still not out of the ballpark. It is worth strategising if that is the only discovered shortfall.

                          Maybe, as a worst case example
                          I wrote some years back, days of dial-up modems, an offline POS system where remote edits of master data were stored locally in tables of the same structure, new transactions similarly handled. When these files upload, check first they don't exist at the server while another terminal was updating, then do all the updating.

                          All depends on what the application is.

                          Comment


                            #28
                            Re: Some Advice Needed!

                            Originally posted by WokingJon View Post
                            Thought I'd give this a go on Google Drive to see what happens when 2 different users enter (for instance) a payment record at about the same time. As I suspected both records were given the same record ID.

                            I don't see any way this can be resolved if using Google Drive as there are multiple copies of both data and INDEX files (one on each PC plus the master database) which are not always fully synched.

                            Indeed, the conflict between the 2 entries I made was resolved by Google by overwriting the older file with the newest. One has to assume that as Google Drive is working at file level with any data that it doesn't understand that this will always be the case - I've not had an opportunity to see if there are any options to give the user the opportunity to resolve conflicts.

                            Great idea, but to allow multiple users update access would require a complete redesign of my app, probably using temporary tables to store any remote updates that could then be applied centrally when received during synch.

                            Would be worth looking for a similar service that doesn't cache the central data on the local PC to see if it works.
                            This may be a solution. The example is with Skydrive , now Onedrive, but there should be a similar way to do it with Google Drive.
                            http://blogs.clariusconsulting.net/k...ve-in-windows/

                            Comment


                              #29
                              Re: Some Advice Needed!

                              I would use Terminal Services - however, if there are a lot of remote users (in excess of 13 concurrent) you will have to go to a farm of servers. Say the client wants 10 local and 50 remote you may be better advised to go to the web.

                              A few years ago Costco had a system that had 175 concurrent remote users, but they had an 800,000 budget for the project.
                              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


                                #30
                                Re: Some Advice Needed!

                                Originally posted by WokingJon View Post
                                Thought I'd give this a go on Google Drive to see what happens when 2 different users enter (for instance) a payment record at about the same time. As I suspected both records were given the same record ID.

                                I don't see any way this can be resolved if using Google Drive as there are multiple copies of both data and INDEX files (one on each PC plus the master database) which are not always fully synched.
                                In my testing one pc was the master and two others where setup as shadows. When you setup a shadow on a normal network it creates a copy of the DB files and stores them on the shadow machine. The shadow updates the files local to it and then they sync to the master. The only difference with the Google Drive setup is sending that sync request across the internet instead of an intranet. I have had two of the machines, the master and one shadow create invoices at as close to the same time as I could and there was no conflict. Both machines where updated to see each others new invoice. I do not know if there is a setting or I am just being lucky but so far my test have resulted in Google drive syncing to all machines so fast I would have to say it was instant.

                                But to take this whole experiment one step in a sideways direction I am now testing mapping a drive letter to a ftp site. Doing it this way there is no local folder in between. The ftp site looks and acts just like a local dive on your pc. Will see how this goes.

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X