DANS DBF Library is a Java library for reading and writing xBase database files. xBase is the name commonly used for dBase and its dialects. The central file in these databases is the DBF file or DataBase File, hence the name of this library.
DANS is a Dutch electronic archiving institute under the auspices of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and partially funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO). It is the initiator of this project. DANS is making this library available under the GNU Public Licence. For more information about DANS, see the DANS website . This library is used by DANS for the MIXED Project .
Although slightly off-topic, we are taking the opportunity to announce here work done on a new library: dans-dp-lib. DataPerfect is a DOS-based database, comparable with dBase in that it had some popularity in the nineties. Our new library will only be able to read DataPerfect databases, but we suspect that that is what most people are likely to want.
The project can be found here on SourceForge .
FoxPro 2.6 files can now also be read and written. This brings the list of supported DBF versions to:
The library has grown another couple of K. We added Clipper 5 support and made the API a little bit more flexible and robust. You can now write Number objects to CHARACTER fields or Strings containing numbers to NUMBER fields, etc. For the overview of all the validations see Javadoc for the Record class .
Please, give us your feed-back. The previous versions have been downloaded about 200 times from several sites, but so far we have had no comments or bug reports. If you would like to see new features, or find bugs or if you can contribute sample DBFs, please contact us! We are especially interested in a copy of dBase II, FoxBase and FoxPro to generate test files. If nothing else, please sign the guestbook ...
Today we released the first beta version of DANS DBF Library. That means we feel fairly confident that it can actually be used in a project. Beta 01 includes support for dBase III+, IV and V.
DBFs with missing end of file byte could not be read properly. Fixed that. Also updated the web-site with one example.
Every self-respecting library needs its "QuickStart Guide," or "Getting Started," or "Usage" page, so we have added one. Find out in under five minutes how to use DANS DBF Library here!
"Release early, release often," is was SourceForge tells us. Maybe we are taking that a little bit too literally, but anyway, here is Alpha 05, within 2 weeks. We have changed the API a little bit, after all we are still alpha, so we are allowed to do that. Once we go beta (which should be soon) we will keep the API more stable.
