DISPLAY STRUCTURE, LIST STRUCTURE

This variation on the theme tells you the structure of the table open in the current or a specified work area.

Usage

DISPLAY | LIST STRUCTURE
        [ IN nWorkArea | cAlias ]
        [ TO PRINTER [ PROMPT ]
          | TO [ FILE ] cFileName [ ADDITIVE ] ]
        [ NOCONSOLE ]

The listing shows the name, type and size (plus decimals) of the field, as well as whether it accepts nulls, whether its tag (if it has one) is ascending or descending, and the collation sequence used. The heading of the listing includes the complete filename and path, the number of records in the table, the date of the last update (the value returned by LUPDATE()) and the table’s code page.

Before VFP, DISPLAY STRUCTURE listings generally fit nicely onto the screen, unless you were using a really big font. In VFP, to accommodate long field names, the whole display got wider and, unless your monitor is humongous and your font is terribly small, the thing wraps and is generally much harder to read than it used to be. Fortunately, this is a design-time tool, not something users ever see, and we find we mostly want to look at field names and types, which are pretty easy to pick out regardless. Still, at least for free tables, it would be helpful to be able to have the nice little display we used to get.

You can put all the same information plus some more into an array using AFIELDS().

Example

USE MyTable
DISP STRU  && does anyone ever type out the whole command?

See Also

AFields(), Create, Display and List, LUpdate()