Application Development with Harbour/Understanding Workareas

What is a workarea in the Clipper/Harbour language?

Let us for a moment think back at the old times when commonly used computers had no mouse and GUI. Nevertheless, if we wanted to use several tables for a task, we had to use some way to tell the computer which tables he should consider. Let us take for example a library. Oversimplifying, we need to use at least three tables to manage it (one for the books, one for the customers and one for the loans).

We might issue these commands:

       SELECT 1
       USE Books
       SELECT 2
       USE Customers
       SELECT 3
       USE Loans
       SELECT Books

We might visualize the result as the three windows in the picture below:

Here the command SELECT works like clicking on a window to activate it, and the workareas themselves look like windows having a number (the workarea number) and a name (the workarea alias).

To close workareas one uses one of the following commands:

• CLOSE
• CLOSE ALL
• USE

Why should you want to use workareas?

Workareas are the natural way of managing database tables in dBASE [...]

Examples of workareas

As we've seen above, we can use the following workareas in program to manage a library:

• Books workarea: a table to store information about the books in the library (fields could include book title, author, publication date, ISBN, etc.)
• Customers workarea: a table to store information about the library's customers (fields could include customer ID, customer name, address, contact information, membership status, etc.)
• Loans workarea: a table to track information about book loans (fields could include loan date, due date, customer ID, book ID, return status, etc.)