If your DOS application is properly written it should recreate the index file if it's missing. Otherwise you may be in trouble. The ntx file is a Clipper index file. You will not be able to recreate the index even with Clipper, if you don't know the index expression used when the index was created.

/LG48
www.clippersweden.se

Originally posted by blabore
I have a legacy DOS app that uses some dbf files that are fairly small in size (10 columns, 1-5 thousand records). The problem is that most of them contain a lot of garbage data, which I want to get rid of. I recently bought a dbf editor which work great, but now when I go through my DOS utility to re-index my dbf files, I'm missing the ntx file for the databases I manually edited. Any ideas on what I need to do here? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Duplicate records is no problem in the index file, unless you state in the index expression that each key will be unique. In that case, duplicated keys will not be added to the Index file.

A tool you might need is DBU that comes with Clipper. With that utility you can create new index files for Clipper applications. I don't have any Clipper installation anymore so I can't help you with this. My best bet is to go to the comp.lang.clipper news group and ask if anyone can share that utility with you. You can acces that news group from this site.

Regards,
Lars-Eric

Originally posted by blabore
Thanks for the reply lg48. I have a quick follow up question. As I mentioned in the first post, the dbf files have a small number of columns, and one column is cleary meant to be unique to each row. Is it a pretty good guess the index expression would involve only this column? Would this mean I just need to make sure I have no duplicate entries? Thanks again.

Originally posted by lg48
Duplicate records is no problem in the index file, unless you state in the index expression that each key will be unique. In that case, duplicated keys will not be added to the Index file.

A tool you might need is DBU that comes with Clipper. With that utility you can create new index files for Clipper applications. I don't have any Clipper installation anymore so I can't help you with this. My best bet is to go to the comp.lang.clipper news group and ask if anyone can share that utility with you. You can acces that news group from this site.

Regards,
Lars-Eric

In your Clipper directory, there's a subdirectory BIN. In this directory you can find the DBU utility, where you can recreate the index files you lost.
The problem in recreating the indexes is not the duplicate record, but the search you made into the program. If you don't recreate the index with all the fields it needs, you may have problems in your ap searching your dbf files.

Thanks jlinareso. Sounds like what you're saying is I might need to experiment a little bit when I re-create the index, until I find the right combination of fields.

Jose,

It's several years since I removed Clipper, Blinker and all that stuff, from my computer :)
I was using Clipper from Summer 87 to 5.3 so I have done a lot of jobs in Clipper. I have also been involved in moving Clipper systems to Windows. I'm also a good friend of one of the guys at the old Nantucket.

Regards,
Lars-Eric
http://www.clippersweden.se

Originally posted by jlinareso
In your Clipper directory, there's a subdirectory BIN. In this directory you can find the DBU utility, where you can recreate the index files you lost.
The problem in recreating the indexes is not the duplicate record, but the search you made into the program. If you don't recreate the index with all the fields it needs, you may have problems in your ap searching your dbf files.