Hi,

I just got an old MS-DOS application, which holds the data of a catalog and of some users as well. The data is stored in files, which represent the different levels of the catalog hierarchy (item, item group, group of item groups, etc.) and each level has 3 different files: a .dat file, which contains the actual data and .ix and .dia files, whose content seem to be a bit confusing to me.
Now I read somewhere that the .ix files contain indices to the data in the .dat files, which are read by the application. This is actually some kind of database, right?
And here is my question: I would love to get all the data out of the data files and port it to another application. Is there any other possibility beside parsing all data files manually, which come to your mind?

Thanks in advance,
Alex

.ix files could possibly be index files?

I think this is obvious, but do these files have a common format, such that I can read out the real data easily?
My question aims at whether the application uses well known database queries or something like that... Maybe something that is used in other applications as well, the .ix files also seem to be used by some other people in that combination with .dat and .dia.

Files in subdirectory a:\storedir\data

products.dia Used when editing files
products.dat The main products file database
products.ix The keyed index for the products file
shelfile.dia Used when editing map files
shelfile.dat The map file database
shelfile.ix The keyed index for the map file
store1.std An encrypted file with default settings
storname.std Encrypted security file
zonedef.sdt encrypted map zone and size data
notfound.dia Used when editing notfound
notfound.dat The notfound files database
notfound.ix The keyed index for notfound

From the filelist.txt file that comes with the demo of http://www.blue-hare.com/manual/manual.htm, these guys seems to use the same db library as your application.

Edit:
http://www.pdmagic.com/im/support/pdf/imw.pdf
These guys do also sell what seems to be a traffic analisis program, which uses .ix .dat and .dia files.

Edit 2:
http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/db/intro1.htm

I think the bluehare program uses an isam db library from borland,it throwed me isam error 10445 and lists something by borland.
The rebuild data program is made in pascal and uses the http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpbtreefiler/ library.
Edit3:
Interesting info: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.p...orum_id=241868

Did you find a windows exe file for the job ?
I've the same problem

just take the dat files and copy them.

see if they will load into access or excel as fixed width files.

I expect the dat files will be data, and ix files indexes. variety of programmes could have produced them, but these are the sort of things you see with b-tree type systems.

ie, non-relational but indivdiually indexed tables/files

if you can work out the data structure, you can probably rebuild the indexes yourself.


if you can't map them as text, you could probably still treat them as files of structuretype, if you can work out the structure!