Re: Help with Paradox 9 table schema

Jim Hargan wrote:
Much here that is new to me! Like you, I use a lot of sub-directories for
self-contained child databases -- so everything I use is always aliased,
and therefore ends up hard coded.

Jim Hargan
Hi Jim,

If you change the working directory to the child database, when you do the linkage of tables for lookups you do not need to use aliases. From then on, Paradox simply assumes that the main table and the lookup table are in the same directory, and does not store the pathway.

Then you can reset the working directory, and still reference the tables using aliases, with all relationships working correctly.

If you do use aliases, you can move the database from one system to another provided that you can map the location to the same letter on the new system as on the old. For example, I used to have all my tables nicely set out in directories, heavily cross-referenced with aliases, and all saved in Q:\Database_Directory. So long as I could snaffle the Q:\ mapping there was no problem. But of course, generally this is not acceptable.

Some years ago I suggested in this forum that (a) aliases were a really great concept, and (b) the way they were turned into hard-coded paths was a really great boo-boo - and got all sorts of strange responses...

In the Amiga OS (now THERE was a great OS) you could define symbolic paths that all software including SuperBase (quite a good RDBMS) could use - so you could have My_Main_Database and My_Handy_Lookup_Tables and so on configurable. The nearest that M$ OS has are things like MyDocuments and shares - but you really need to be able to define shares within shares.

It would be handy to have a "directory" / "module" concept in CS databases - that is, be able to put tables into logical groupings within one CS database - maybe already there?
.

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