FILEFLEX PROGRAMMER MANUAL
CHAPTER 1
Introducing FileFlex
FileFlex is the ragingly-fast, cross-platform, relational database engine for multimedia, designed for creating CD-ROMs, kiosks, and interactive multimedia projects. FileFlex is fully FoxPro and Access compatible. FileFlex and FoxPro/Access can directly exchange files without conversion. FileFlex requires no special drivers and only a small amount of RAM--allowing you to add relational database capabilities to their projects at virtually no cost in system resources. FileFlex also includes dynamic, on-the-fly office-quality encryption and full-text search and retrieval capabilities. Versions of FileFlex offer multi-user capabilities and a future release will offer client/server services
FileFlex Features and Benefits
FileFlex features include:
- FileFlex is cross-platform: Director users don't have to rewrite FileFlex Lingo source code, it's the same on both Macintosh and Windows! You can use the same data files on Macintosh and Windows!
- Extremely high-performance: FileFlex uses high-performance data management algorithms to retrieve data in any size database. Properly used, FileFlex can retrieve any record in a database containing in excess of a billion records in well under a second on even the slowest machines.
- Optimized for the host environments: FileFlex has been optimized with 32-bit native versions for Windows 95, Windows NT, and the PowerPC processor on Mac OS.
- FileFlex is Year 2000 Ready: FileFlex has been designed so that its internal date formats take into account four-digit dates. As a result, all date storage in FileFlex is fully ready for the Year 2000.
- Add database features to your projects: Director gives you complete interface flexibility. And now with FileFlex, you've got all the speed, power, and capability of a relational database as well. FileFlex works behind the scenes, completely hidden from the user.
- Fully-relational database: FileFlex now supports real, hard-core relations (i.e., one-to-one, many-to-one relations, one-to-many and many-to-many relations) just like FoxPro and Access. You can perform complex relational queries across files and tables and move through the database in a virtual, combined-file, relational order. Not only can you perform a combined, relational query, but you can also specify the sort order that defines how FileFlex will traverse the data.
- One of the principle differentiating features of FoxPro has been its incredibly fast and powerful Rushmore relational query acceleration technology. We've implemented a similar technology within FileFlex.
- Elegant integration into your environment: Grab a single record or any desired group of records. You can drop retrieved data into your application's native fields or global variables. FileFlex gives you transparent, totally non-instrusive access to thousands or millions of records.
- Easier update management: Because your data is stored externally from your project, updating users with new versions of your project is much easier.
- Simple and complex searches are possible: Use logical expressions to find information in a database file. A logical expression can consist of constants, field names, and functions joined together by operators.
- Standard files supported, FoxPro/Access compatible: FileFlex supports the use and updating of ragingly fast index files. FileFlex can directly read FoxPro data files and can dynamically reindex as data changes. FileFlex can directly exchange files without any conversion required. FileFlex data files can be used as "external tables" from within Access and can be updated and managed along with other Access tables.
- New, advanced features: FileFlex introduces dynamic, on-the-fly office-quality encryption/decryption and simple full-text search and retrieval.
FileFlex is a very tight code library. It is distributed as a loadable code module (a DLL under Windows and a shared library on the Macintosh). As a result, there's no need for interapplication communications and you don't have to worry about special installations for alternate applications. FileFlex also does not require any special drivers. Once you install the one code module, FileFlex is available.
FileFlex System Capacities
FileFlex supports data files according to the following limits:
- Max data file size: 1GB
- Max characters per record: 64K
- Max fields per record: 128
- Max characters per field: 254
- Max width of index expression: 240
- Digits of precision in numeric computations: 19
- Memo entry size: 64K on 16-bit systems, 4GB on 32-bit systems
- Maximum memory variables: limited to memory only
- Limits on number of files open: constrained by available memory
Discuss this chapter on the FileFlex Boards.
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