You haven't been led astray - flat file goes not necessarily mean text or human-readable. The data is in an ISAM format, and you will either need to locate and purchase one of the data extraction tools that used to be on the market, or write an extraction routine yourself in BBx. There is a very small amount of information out there about their file format, if you want to try writing a BBx decoding library from scratch. It might be much easier to set up a dummy printer and print out each patient's complete file - there's likely a print routine in the software. Then take the output and parse it with your favourite programming language. If you get fancy with a printcap definition, you might find ways of making the parsing easier. This still might require a temp sitting at a terminal for several days printing one file at a time. I've done one AIX to Linux conversion of a BBx app... I'm never doing that again except on a time-and-materials basis, for about $500/hr with no estimates up front. BBx is a decent programming language (especially for its time) but they have (or had, it's been a few years) absolutely no idea how to package their software, or how to build it in a portable manner. I remember having to exclude libc from updates because the interpreter would break on anything except the EXACT version they had compiled against. Which, fyi, means any system running a BBx app probably has multiple exploitable bugs that have long since been patched. Have fun, -Adam
Michael Sierks msierks@gwn.ca wrote:
Hello All,
I have an issue with some software that is well before my time and was hoping someone from the muug group would be of assistance. I have been tasked with extracting data from the following program.
Assyst Practice Managment (GENIE) Software V8.8.6 an Emergis Inc. Product(STX.EME)
This program itself is running on an old AIX 5.1 server and has been written in BBx Pro5, a language I didn't even know existed. This language appears to be an extension of Basic and is know as Business Basic. Written by this company.
Now the trouble is this program has no built in way of dumping/extracting the data. It isn't using Pro/5's built in data storage engine so I cannot simply use ODBC to pull the data out. We have been informed it is storing all its data in a flat file. And the best way to retrieve the data is by reading backups from the tape drive, which we have done so. The data files retrieved mostly end in the ".REC" and ".SUB" file extensions and appear to contain some patient info. But the largest file that seems to contain most data begins with the text "<<bbx>>" and is definetely not stored as flatfile.
Does anyone have experience with this BBx language or does anybody have any ideas for extracting the data ? I ask because the company that has written this practice management software has no interest in assisting with exporting the data. Any suggestions are appreciated.
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Adam Thompson