Help!!!! BTR to text 1

[Guest_imported]

Hi,

I don’t know anything about BTrieve and I have only these .BTR files nothing else and i think these are generated by old dos based btrieve version. I can't find any DDF files with application.

1. Do think there must be a DDF file for each .BTR file? or DDF can be embedded in .BTR file.

2. How and what I need to convert these files (table structure and data) into any format.

Thanks in advance

Nadeem Awan

 

[mirtheil]

To answer your questions:
1. There isn't a DDF for each BTR file. The DDFs (there are at least 3 of them) describe all of the BTR files. The DDF cannot be embedded in the BTR. At a minimum, there are 3 DDFs. The first is FILE.DDF. This links a logical table name to the Btrieve file name (in your case, the BTR file). THe second is FIELD.DDF. This links the field definitions to the file in FILE.DDF. The field defintions are the field name, data type, length, offset, and flags. The third DDF is INDEX.DDF. This describes the indexes on the fields in FIELD.DDF.
2. If you know the field structure of the BTR files, you have several options for converting these files. With the structure, you can create an application that uses the Btreive API to extract the data into whatever format you want. You can also create DDFs and use any number of tools including a product called Data Junction (

http://www.datajunction.com)

that can convert from Btrieve (with DDFs) to any number of formats. You can, if you have an ODBC driver and DDFs, use Access or Excel or any other ODBC enabled application to access the Btrieve data.
Hope that helps.

 

[grnelson]

If you need to create the DDF files and don't know the existing structure you can take a look at BtSearch at

http://www.nssdd.com.

It is a utility that helps you analyze your btrieve data and build the DDF files. Once created you can also use it to export to dbase or ascii.

Gil Gil

 

[icici]

NO DDFs, NO Need to WORRY
In case u know the data contained in the above files and their structure then u need not worry about not having the DDF files.

In such a scenario u can download a utility called as BTFILER. which will help u to browse the .BTR files available from

http://www.nomad.ee/btrieve/files/

. Try this utilities to save ur data.

Alternatively u may load btrieve (if page size is known) normally used page size is 3072 and the syntax is btrieve /p:3072 followed by the command butil - save <btrieve file> <output txt file>. these commands will first load btrieve and then save the btrieve file to the text file given in <output txt file>

:-V