AddBDay 1.1 (c) 1996 by Fionn Behrens **** Installation Just copy AddBDay to a directory fo your choice and install it the usual way. AddBDay will write a preferences file M:\OPD\ADDBDAY.DBF. This file should not be deleted as long as you use AddBDay to add/update birthdays in your agenda. If AddBDay exits irregularly (file error, memory) there will be a file named M:\OPD\ADDBDAY.BAK. Do **not** delete it, just start and exit AddBDay once to get rid of it. **** Introduction and general information AddBDay is a tool to help you in having always an up-to-date Agenda file. It will scan any database file with your birthday entries (I suppose every Psion user has something like a names database). The format of the birthday entries may be anything, as long as there are three numbers somewhere in it and they are always in the same order. AddBDay wont write to your Data file at all. It will write to your Agenda only with your explicit permission, or, if you dont want to confirm every entry manually, it can perform its task automatically. Birthday entries which are already existing are detected and wont be written a second time. This, however, only applies to entries which are in exactly the same format as the entries written by AddBDay. AddBDay remembers which birthdays you did not want to have in your agenda last time and will not write them automatically in all future runs. (they will be marked "No" in manual update mode) AddBDay does *NOT* write (type 5) repeating entries to your agenda. This was a design decision for the following reasons: - Repeating entries eat up twice as much disk space as single entries. This means you can have *different* single entries for 2 years for the same diskspace cost. - Times change, people change, preferences change. You may not want to see a persons birthday next year whom you had to congratulate this year. - Identifying non-repeating birthday entries is technically easier (I do not have to rely on the text string information only) - Running AddBDay once a year is only 5 minutes at max. So, if you want to have some entries repeating, just mark them as repeating after the first run of AddBDay. When you run AddBDay next year or just for an other year, AddBDay will try to write them again and you will have to mark them "No" to avoid duplicate entries showing up. However, AddBDay will remember those crossed out entries. This program is Shareware. It is fully functional in unregistered state but the registered version is a lot more comfortable. See the "Registration" part below. **** Usage There are three basic menu entries, Info, Prefs and Start. Info: Gives you some information about AddBDay Prefs: You will be prompted to select an Agenda file, a database file and the birthday field within that database. Note: Please make sure the files are not in use while running AddBDay You will get error messages if you dont. The program also asks you for a primary name field, a secondary name field and an alternative name field. The meaning of them is as follows: - The primary name field and the secondary name field will be used to construct the birthday entry, that is, if you have a database field for the first name (e.g. Kathy) and another field for the last name (e.g. Robbins): * You may select the first name field in the primary name gadget and "None" in the secondary name gadget. You will get f.e. >> Kathy's Birthday << in your agenda (without the quotes) * You may select the first name field in the primary name gadget and the last name field in the secondary name gadget. You will get >> Kathy Robbins's Birthday << in your agenda. If you have only one name field in your database the first choice is yours. - The alternative name field will be used if the primary and/or secondary name fields are empty but the birthday field has a value. You may use something like a company entry in your database for this or just leave it set to "None". The programm will now ask you if you want to update manually or automatically. Automatic updates are only available for registered users. In automatic mode the program wont ask you anything and just write any new entries from the Database to the Agenda. Entries you have chosen not to write to the Agenda in a previous manual run will not be added, just the real new ones. If you do a manual update you can have yourself being asked to add existing entries a second time. This should normally be left "No", because you dont want duplicate entries, do you? I may add the option to delete existing entries at this point somewhen in the future. The other preferences entries should be quite self explanatory. Just fiddle around a bit with them and make sure you really want what they say. If you happen to find that your 50 new bold birthdays look actually ugly in Agenda you will have to delete them all by hand *grin*. Start: Starts the program itself. You will see it scanning your database, then your agenda. After that the data will be compared. If you selected manual mode in your prefs you will be prompted for all new entries if you want them. After that they will be written to the agenda. If you did not set your prefs, Start will bring you to the preferences menu! Note: AddBDay stores quite some information in its data file while scanning. For a database of 25kB with 75% birthday entries you will need estimated 6kB of temporary free disk space on M: If AddBDay runs out of space it will abort with an error. Exit: Save your preferences and quit the program For unregistered users: Register: This menu will give you the possibility to enter a registration key. You can also obtain registration details here if you want to register. **** Registering Registered users get a separate preferences menu. They can set preferences for data, agenda and general options separately without walking through the entire procedure each time. All settings, including file names, style, year, manual/auto etc. will be loaded from the prefs file and do not need to be set again on each run. The option to act automatically (see above) will be enabeled for registered users. All additional features of future versions will only be available for registered users. You can register by sending $10, DM10, £5 or a valid key to a Psion or Amiga Shareware program you wrote to: Fionn Behrens Glückaufstraße 48/102 57076 Siegen This snail mail address will be valid until late 1997. Email: fionn@unix-ag.uni-siegen.de (will be valid for many years) fionn@informatik.uni-siegen.de Accepted payment is cash only. The bank would charge f.e. £5 for cashing in a £6 Eurocheque, so I am sorry not being able to offer any other possibility. Be inventive when sending, dont just put money in an envelope, it may be found and stolen. And *please* inform me by email before you do so! *** History 1.00 - first release 1.10 - fixed wrong TYPE tag, caught some minor internal bugs. - added cache statement (a lot speedier now) - fixed crash problem with birtday string >40 chars. may now be up to 255 chars. **** EOT last Update: 01-01-1997