I’ve been given a gift this Christmas. A rar compressed file containing 782 files.

It’s the directory used to build an old Clipper software, whose development started more than 20 years ago in Clipper 87 and is still in use by a couple of companies.

One of the two is a company operated by a friend of mine. About 17 years ago I created a program to export data from my friend “ERP” to be imported in this one. Both were clipper-based and the software had an import function in place. Unfortunately not all the infos we needed to move were imported by the procedure so I did some “tricks” (with developers knowledge, guidance and approval): I went directly to the DBFs, searching and adding records. The only drawback was that the user had to force a reindex. Not bad. This system has been working for years…

This old version of the application has been retired, the developers said (a couple of years ago) that they were not going to support it or develop new features to it. All the codebase was rewritten (ported?) in a completely new language and using a SQL database.

Unfortunately the import procedure that is present in the new version doesn’t cover all my friend needs and I can’t use the trick to directly add to the data tables. The developers can’t add these new functionality in a short time…

Just to complicate the situation, my friend company is updating the hardware and switching to Windows 7 64 bit. The old Clipper 87 software is not going to work on that workstations.

So, during a meeting, I just said that perhaps it would be possible to port the software to Harbour and at the same time solve the 64 bit problem and update the printing system that now needs a dot matrix printer. The answer was a “let us think about it” and I interpreted it as a “no”.

Some days later, just before Christmas, I found a mail with the rar file in the mailbox.

Back to the gift.

The rar file is just one directory that includes everything to build the executables and support them, including dbase III+, clipper and blinker, libraries, object files, batch files and of course source files.

I’d like to document somehow the porting of this app from Clipper 87 to current Harbour; I can’t name the software nor post its source code or screenshots, but I think that publishing some lines may be ok.