BtSearch Product Review

Reprinted From: Spring 1997 Issue of Btrieve Developer's Journel

This was written when BtSearch was in it's infancy. It has progressed a lot in 10 years!

Product Analysis

BtSearch

by Jim Barber jlbarber@wolfenet.com

Things are looking up. The snow is gone, (mostly) I saw the sun today, (barely) and we have a new Btrieve tool to look at (definitely). Let’s get to it, shall we?

BtSearch is a Windows-based (3.1 and above) tool that does just about all of it. You can view or edit your data, add or drop indexes, or build DDF files for use with most of the newer reporting tools. You can also import or export Btrieve files from either Dbase OR "flat" files, which is an interesting feature. It does require DDF files, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The days of hex editors are finally coming to an end, and I for one am not sorry to see them go.

Installation

Since BtSearch is distributed as shareware, it’s normally found in a Zip file. By today’s "bloatware" standards, it’s a lightweight, weighing in at only 436KB in ZIP form. Since it was (apparently) written in VB 3.0, it requires VBRUN300.DLL, which most of you probably already have on your disk. If not, the file is available from many different sources including the author’s web site.

Being somewhat protective of my \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory, and inclined to be stubborn, I didn’t use the Setup program, but just ran the program "in place." It ran just fine that way, and escaped my "What? No uninstall??" routine as a result.

Operation

BtSearch has a clean, logical interface that separates function groups with "tabs." The first order is to either tell the program the location of your DDF files, or to create ‘em as you go. It has a unique way of building the definitions; select the data type of the field, then drag the mouse over the part of the record that the field occupies. I was a little put off at first by the way it works, but got used to it pretty quickly. Once the fields themselves are defined and named, you then build the indexes, using the field names. This approach is miles ahead of the "start, length" method, since it doesn't require that you calculate the field positions or lengths in advance.

Once the DDF files are built, you can now use them to edit, view, search, print, export, import, etc. I’ll go over each function quickly, to give you the idea of how it works.

To edit data, you first open the DDF file, and select the appropriate Btrieve file by double-clicking on the filename. This switches to the "fields" tab, where you select one or more fields for the "view" of the data that you want. Once the fields have been selected, you click the "Search/Edit" tab, which displays that view. Editing data is done logically, with the ENTER key moving to the next field in the record.

Searching for data is a snap. You can search by index, perform a "complete" (global) search, or a complex search. The complex search includes Boolean operators, (AND, OR) and can be done with multiple criteria. I did get a couple of "Invalid Property Value" errors while doing the searches, but whether that was caused by my computer, video card, phases of the moon, or real bugs I don’t know.

Printing file or DDF structures is done from a pull-down menu, while data is printed from an icon that looks suspiciously like a printer at the top-right of the "Search/Edit" window. Some fiddling with the column widths is required to get the data to "fit" in the printed columns, but you can come up with a pretty fair report if you’re willing to spend a little time with it.

As I mentioned earlier, you can import and export data to or from Btrieve files. What particularly caught my eye was that BtSearch will export in tab-delimited format to either a file or to the clipboard, which I at least, would find very useful. In that format, the data can be either imported or pasted into Excel, and probably most of the other spreadsheets out there. You can also import/export from a dBase file, which can make file conversions a lot less work for developers.

Jim Says

All-in-all, BtSearch is probably one of the better shareware offerings I’ve come across. I did find a couple of bugs and rough edges, but I don’t think you could beat it in the offered price range. The downloaded version is crippled to an extent, (won’t write DDF files, imports/exports are limited) but that is the normal way business is done in the shareware market. If you like it, register it. The manner in which it’s crippled doesn’t get in the way of and honest evaluation.

Since BtSearch just fits on a single 3.5" high-density diskett, I think it would be a very good "portable" (non-intrusive) tool to take to a customer’s site. It’s available on CompuServe in Pervasive’s forum, (GO BTRIEVE) or from the author’s web pages a the address listed below.

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