migrating apps from VFP6 to VFP8

[mpastore]

Hi,

This picks up on a previous thread concerning issues with vfp8.

I am am going directly from vfp6 to vfp8. Can anyone point me to a list of "gotchas" that I may encounter? I never migrated to vfp7 and from what I understand there are issues that may arise when I recompile my apps.

Thanks Mike

 

[Mike Lewis]

Mike,

Just a couple of points off the top of my head (I'm sure other people will contribute some more):

- In a SELECT - SQL statement, the grouping works differently. If you want to ensure that your grouping works the same way as in earlier versions, you need SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 70.

- If you create a menu file in 6.0, then open it 8.0, you will no longer be able to open it in 6.0 (actually, you can, but it involves a bit of hacking).

Mike


Mike Lewis
Edinburgh, Scotland

http://www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk

 

[Mike Lewis]

Mike,

I just thought of a couple of other points:

- Some of the navigation keys for grids and browses have changed.

- You can no longer use DISTINCT in a SELECT that has memo fields in the result set. As far as I know, the only workaroud is to convert the memos to chars, truncating as necessary.

Mike


Mike Lewis
Edinburgh, Scotland

http://www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk

 

[mpastore]

Mike,

Thanks, this is very helpful, keep the tips coming as you remember them. Mike

 

[ramani]

Hi mPastore,

I noticed that the default property value set for Themes is .t. and that follows XP themes. (I tested in XP computer). This results in PageFrames, Grids etc. get the default property of Themes as .t.. The result is that whatever you have set as BackColor for example on Pages of Pageframes dont show up, since the themes take over.

If you want to simply migrate from VFP6 to VFP8, then, best way to counter this is to set this in a global way with a signle line of code.. and that is.. in your MAIN.PRG at the initial place, add the code...

_SCREEN.THEMES = .f.

Remember to add this as far at the start as possible, since the effect will be lost and some refreshing will not take place to get proper effect, if it is at the end.



ramani
(Subramanian.G),FoxAcc, ramani_g@yahoo.com

 

[RontheScone]

Hi,
I am a VFP 6 developer and am evaluating VFP8 to see what problems I may have updating and distributing our package. I use a rather complex DBC structure with many files and relations in a large application. I also skipped VFP7.

One problem I have encountered is an unexplained "Invalid Key Length" error message in one of my screens. After looking for hours at the problem, I found that one of the VFP 8 dataenvironment tables for the DBC did a funny! When I clicked on the File in the container (specifically on the file title) the file name eg. Cursor8 showed Cursor9 in the properties window while the cursor name remains at Cursor8!
This is only evident when I clicked on the DBC file Box header and corrected when I clicked on the Fields: description.

I checked the DBC in VFP6 and all is well. I suspected the problem might be in the DBC, but it isn't.

The Fix is to remove and then add the file back to the container and save. But this makes distribution of VFP8 compiled stuff incompatible with my existing clients data so until I see a fix here I won't be using VFP8!

 

[RontheScone]

RE: Invalid Key Length Error Message.
Well, I was wrong! Seems VFP8 picked up a program error when VFP6 didn't. I had a relation set where the key was C(3) and the field in the child was n(6,2). VFP6 allowed this without error!