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.
Applied patches by Pavel Kuzmenko, who solved a bug that appeared when the last character of a file whas a Cyrillic character and one by Bartłomiej Pietrzyk, who managed to improve performance significantly.
Upgraded the source code to Maven 3. It will probably not build anymore using Maven 2.
To be honest, I haven't been keeping a very close eye on the mailing list, so the response-time to your patches may seem very long to you. You are right! Anyway, I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to everyone who has contributed patches. Thank you!
Applied patch by Evgeniy Romanchenko which solved a the following bug. The filtering of soft returns from a string value was broken. A soft return is 0x8d followed by 0x0a. However if a 0x8d appeared by itself, it and the following character were also filtered, which is incorrect.
With the help of Konrad Borowiecki added the possibility to delete records from the database. As in the original dBase you must first flag the records as deleted (using the deleteRecordAt function) and then remove them physically with a call to pack. Also with the help of Konrad added the function updateRecordAt which modifies an existing record.
Added constructors to Database and Table that take a character set name. The string provided here must be one of the strings returned by java.nio.charset.Charset.availableCharsets(). The specified character set will then be used to read and write CHARACTER and MEMO type values from and to the DBF files. Note that, although there is now a getCharsetName on the Table class, no detection of the character set used in existing databases is done. This information must be provided by the calling program!
This beta fixes a bug int the Value classes. It was impossible to write a raw value read from a database to a field with different specifications. This violated the Value contract.
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.
