🚀 go-pugleaf

tomk@animal.er.bell.ca (Tom Kanary) writes:

>I have encountered a small business application which runs on a IBM PC
>under DrDos which appears to be built on a database product like dBase, etc.
>There is only one executable (application.exe) which is a forms based
>data entry/query program. As far as I can determine it was built by a part-time
>programmer for this business. When the business changed hands the new owner
>had no means of contacting the original programmer. In short, the new owner
>would like to extract the company business records from this database 
>and insert them into a supportable package like dBase, etc. Needless to say
>there is no export to ascii feature. When the package starts up there
>is a copywrite notice refering to "Drafton" (?). I don't know if
>this refers to the forms package, the company name of the programmer,
>or the database package. The database is made up
>of files with *.dra, *.dps, *.drm and *.ndx files. 

>Does anyone recognize this package? If so I would appreciate some advice as
>to how to extract the data. My two options now are to "print forms" to
>a file and parse the data but there is no "print all" command or to
>write some code to read the raw data files by guessing the record 
>format.
>-- 
>Tom Kanary

This sounds like a variation of "Clipper", which also produces an .EXEcutable
program but uses .DBF for the data and .NDX for the indexes;  this is
supposed to be based on dBase IV (or under).

I would suggest stripping the data files with some handy stripper (you or I
can write a quickie in C) and keeping just the ascii, then look at how the
data is represented & try to parse it into proper format.  Several packages
can do such parsing, but it is often simpler to write your own than try to
decipher their (often) cryptic macro instructions & formats!

Good luck!

Misha.