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While looking for a way to discover the relationships between fields in Sage ABRA Suite I came an answer that sounded like if you have a free table directory with Visual Fox Pro, you're going to be stuck guessing at what the schema really is:

"Is this just a set of VFP free tables or is there a VFP database, as well? If there's a database, you'll have files with DBC, DCT and DCX extensions."

Is this really the case? I checked my ABRA installation's Data directory (a free table directory according it's ODBC connection) for files with *.DBC, *.DCT and *.DCX extensions and I didn't find any of them.

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Can you clarify further what you need to accomplish? When you say schema, what pieces of information do you need, other than table and field names, types etc...? –  Sam Anwar Sep 1 '12 at 14:25
I mean primary and foreign keys. –  leeand00 Mar 21 '13 at 13:56
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Yes, in a situation where it is just free tables you will only establish the schema in terms of inter-table relationships and the general structure of how the data hangs together if this has been published by Sage, because there is no metadata anywhere defining this information.

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If you have a license to MSDN Professional (or higher) you have a license to Visual FoxPro. Looking a the structures is as simple as:

USE {table name} NOUPDATE

If you don't have Visual FoxPro via MSDN, and all you need is the structures for the tables, you might find something like this useful tool: DBF Viewer 2000


It looks like you can modify the structures so you should be able to peek into the structures as well. Not a bad solution for $50. Free trial so you can see if it works.

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@leeand00, Careful on the DBF Viewer... I worked with one (not positive of version) and if the table had an auto-increment column, the DBF viewer broke the link if any attempt to edit any data occurred. -- again, just a cautionary note. –  DRapp Sep 3 '12 at 19:58
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