valentina and rev 2.0

[jrvalent at wisc.edu]

  Well, I have been working away trying to write a good dictionary program
for an endangered language i work with. i have been trying to use the
valentina xcmd and runrev 2.0, on both mac os x.2.6 and mac os 9.2.2.  so
far, my results are dismal, to say the least. here are some problems:

a. I open my Valentina database using RunRev's built-in database query
builder; the database has several distinct tables, only one of which has a
unique primary key, though the rest all have records that can be uniquely
identified by field combinations. Now one thing that throws me is this: when
i select the unique field in the table having such to be the primary key,
and then close the database query builder (dbqb) -- when i reopen the dbqb,
it almost always lists "None" as the primary key, unless I click on the
"refresh" button. Is this correct behavior? Same thing happens with
multi-field key definitions in the dbqb: i type for example "fld 1,fld 2,
fld 3, fld 4" into the dbqb, close it up, and when reopening, the primary
key is listed as "None" until I click "refresh". What is going on here?

  Also, I do not understand why if there is only one database open, RunRev
can give me a number such as "3", "5" or "7". Why not "1"? Are there some
ghost databases open? This perplexes me.

b. When I tried to intialize Valentina directly, without using the dbqb, all
hell broke lose. I made a typo in the path to the database, and 1.
Revolution instantly crashed; 2. opening my stack again, and querying
revopendatabases() produced a negative number, something like -412 (followed
by many more digits) [i fixed this by reinstalling _revolution_]. When I was
certain that I had the correct path specified, and ran the stack in which I
was trying to get Valentina initialized, the stack crashed, _and_ the dbqb
no longer functioned-- it was hopelessly broken. On my g4 cube running in
os9.2.2, I cannot now fix this -- even reinstalling RunRev has no effect. I
have checked my Valentina databases using Valentina's built-in checker, and
it says that there's nothing wrong with the database. Does this mean that my
system has to be reinstalled to get things to work? How could this be?

  I really love RunRev, think it's a wonderful and powerful potential tool
for people like me, academics who need some programming power in their
research, but don't have time to learn C++ or some such thing. But I want to
write a database stack that I can give to typical computer users -- when the
program is so finicky, i really worry.

  We so need our Danny Goodman to show up and write us a good cookbook, too.
I think the docs on using the dbqb are quite good, but they really lack in
not giving us a clear-cut example of usage -- e.g., I still can't figure out
how you _delete_ a record using runrev db commands, but i've probably
overlooked something.

rand