DBASE is a popular database program for PCs. The way in which this program stores databases has been adopted by a large number of suppliers.

File layout

As a rule, a DBASE file has the extension .dbf. These are files that cannot be read as text. All fields have a name that may consist of a number of characters. The field length is fixed, with the exception of the so called "memo" fields, of which there may be one in each record. Adlib does not read memo fields in. Repeated fields do not occur in these files.

Conversion

With Designer, DBASE files can only be imported, not exported; export is not possible because this file format is not suitable for repeated fields. Memo fields are not imported.
Field names in a DBASE file are likely to differ considerably from field names in Adlib. For the tag mapping in an import job, you enter the names of the DBASE fields as left-hand part (source) of the tag pair; Adlib tags are the destination tags.

Example of a tag pair definition: