The process requires the installation of a FoxPro ODBC driver which may be a challenge on its own when working in a 64-bit Windows environment. The table relations were nicely recovered and most of the data got transfered nicely into Access but we had issues with character set and datatype conversions. Our first attempt was to get the database loaded into Access, but that was only a partial success. Given that it is so difficult to get the application to run it was quickly clear that we needed to convert the database into another format for archiving and presentation purposes.

We were clearly missing some libraries in obscure places or some registry entries. Any attempt we made to try to get it to run on another (virtual) machine failed. The custom application is created with FoxPro, but the application’s installation program is no longer available. but the image was created with a version of Norton Ghost that is not recent enough to convert it in a virtual machine, but we can explore the image. While the PC was still working, it was pretty old and looked like it could die any moment. The archive institution received a PC as part of a journalist’s archive and amongst other things there was a custom-made database application installed on it. This is the story of our first database archiving attempt. It depends on the size of the database.As a first encounter with database archiving, FoxPro is a nice challenge. The conversion process takes between 15 seconds and multiple minutes. If something went wrong, output.zip contains the error message. The file output.zip will contain a Excel file, one for each table in the set of input files. Let's assume we only want to convert the categories table,Ĭurl -F -F -F -F -F -F '' -o output.zip The files of the tables that we want to convert. In addition to that, we also have to upload

In any case, we have to upload the database container files. For example the table categories has the files categories.dbf, categories.cdx andĬategories.fpt, while the table customers has only the files customers.dbf and customers.cdx. The database directory contains the database container files (northwind.dbc, northwind.dct, northwind.dcx)Īnd a number of table files. Let's imagine we want to convert the Visual FoxPro 9.0 sample DBF files provided by Microsoft.

Open visual foxpro database