The whole power of Delphi's native tools for databases manipulation is not required in small single-user applications. To my mind, there are many cases when there is no need to depend on many IDAPI DLLs if your program works with few tables on your PC. That's why I rewrote my unit for DBF tables, which was originally created for Borland Pascal 7.0, in Borland Delphi. There are several distinction from the previous Pascal version 2.0, which was produced in January, 1996 (odbfile2.zip).

1. Since Delphi supports component library, I made TDBFTable a component instead of previous TDBF object). To my mind, it's more convenient.

2. Pascal collections are substituted by list objects in Delphi. That's why I excluded iteration methods ForEach, FirstThat, NextThat, LastThat and PredThat from the TDBFTable's set of methods. But there are new methods and properties now for providing processing of records, and modification of previously written BP-applications will not be difficult.

3. According to the same reason the structure of DBF tables is defined now by means of lists of field definitions, not by collections. Moreover, there is a new component TDBFStructure now, so you may define and modify structures manually at design time and by calling method DefineFields at run-time. Of course, you also may form structures dynamically from the code, as before.

4. The support of memo fields is implemented. You may set data of unlimited size from memory buffers and files into memo fields and get data from these fields into memory or files.

The current version 3.1 (July, 1999) has several new features in comparison with 3.0.

1. Arbitrary blob data may be stored in memo fields now. In dBase III 1Ah symbol is treated as termination char in memo fields, so we must always take care of the absence of such symbols memo fields, otherwise the first one in the field would be estimated as its end. Text data never contain such symbols, but blob fields like images, archives and so on have not this limitation. In version 3.1 of ODBF you have 4 new methods: GetBlobToBuffer, GetBlobToFile, SetBlobFromBuffer and SetBlobFromFile. Arbitrary blob data can be encoded/decoded by them in/from pseudotext which is stored in memo fields.

2. Problem of year 2100 was solved. In previous versions 2100 was considered to be a leap year, date 2100/02/29 was admissible and procedure NextDate and function CountDays could return incorrect result. Boolean function LeapYear was added to ODBFTool unit because standard IsLeapYear function is not available in early versions of Delphi.

3. Buffers for storing file names were increased. Now the size of full file name may be 254 bytes, in previous version maximum full name length was 80 symbols.

4. Problem of pathnames with points was solved. In ODBF 3.0 DBF-table with memo-fields couldn't be correctly opened by USE method if at least one point ('.') took place in the path names of DBF and DBT files (E. g., 'C:\MY.DIR\TABLE.DBF').