Chapter 16 Customizing Your Development ... - dFPUG-Portal

478 The Fundamentals of Visual FoxPro 6.0
QBF Builder
QBF Builder, by the same folks who brought you Mail Manager, is a control that you can drop
on any data-entry form to provide “query by form” capabilities. It works with tables and
local/remote views. You can save and rerun query definitions, and access advanced criteria
(“contains”, “inlist”, “like”, etc.) via a context menu on the query form. See Figure 16.21.
www.classycomponents.com
Figure 16.21. QBF Builder from Classy Components.
Stonefield Database Toolkit
Visual FoxPro provides something FoxPro developers have needed for years—a built-in data
dictionary. Visual FoxPro’s data dictionary provides table and field validation, field captions,
triggers, even table and field comments. See Figure 16.22.
Unfortunately, many things are missing from the data dictionary, such as structural
information necessary to create or update table structures at client sites, and useful information
such as captions for tables and indexes. Also, the tools Visual FoxPro provides to manage the
database container itself are less robust than you’d expect. For example, altering the structure
of a table breaks views based on that table. Table and field-name changes aren’t propagated
throughout the database, resulting in orphaned database objects. Moving a table to a different
directory or changing the .DBF name causes the database to lose track of the table.
Stonefield Database Toolkit (SDT) overcomes these limitations and many others we’ve
found in Visual FoxPro, and provides additional functionality that serious application
developers need. There are three aspects to SDT:
• It enhances the tools Visual FoxPro provides to manage the database container.