DANS DataPerfect Library is a Java library for reading DataPerfect files. DataPerfect is a file-based database product, originally created by the same company as the well-known WordPerfect word processor.
DANS is a Dutch electronic archiving institute under the auspices of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and partially funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO). It is the initiator of this project. DANS is making this library available under the GNU Public Licence. For more information about DANS, see the DANS website . This library is used by DANS for the MIXED Project .
We want to be clear about the scope of this project. The following are some features that are currently not supported. Some of them may be supported in the future. If you want to contribute a feature, feel free to send us a patch proposal.
Today we finally took the big step and released version 1.0.0. Apart from performing numerous tests on all the test data we could get hold of, we have added the following features:
Our Christmas present just before the closing of the decade: beta-03 :) The following bugs have been fixed:
Another beta. We are starting to test with "real-world" data we find on the internet. This revealed some interesting bugs already. We are working to solve some more bugs. The following things have been fixed in this beta:
Today we have release the first beta version. All the features we want for version 1.0.0 are present. They just haven't been tested thoroughly. The new functionality includes:
You can now retrieve the panel name. Also, made the search for "text files" (the storage for variable length fields) case insensitive.
Formatting of dates and times implemented. You can now get the date or time formatted as specified by the field definition by calling Record.getValuesAsString().
Experimental support for reading variable length text fields was added.
Finally we have got around to creating the first alpha release. It supports reading the list of panels, retrieving of each panel some (by far not all) properties and the list of fields. Also it is possible to iterate through the records, although we don't read variabele length text fields yet.
Enough work still cut out for us! But at least you will get an idea about the API and how it is supposed to work. There is no user guide yet. Have a look at the unit tests to find out how to use this library.