Steve, Wow! Thank you so, so much for your beautiful post. I loved it all, and I think that your assessment is pretty much right on the money on all counts. And, yes, I am a very quick typist ;-) I am also sleeping great these days, but thanks for your concern there. I grew up in an environment I now recognize is a bit weird. The way we were taught to deal with intellectual questions was to thrash them out until you got a clear answer. Personal insults/ Not cool. Cheap arguments like "it's a secret" or "someone smarter than you knows better", well, let's just say you only ever tried any of that nonsense once as the rest of the group would tear at you like a pack of dogs. Unpleasant. So, I'm all for pushing ahead until I get an answer that makes sense.
You're right, I need more tools - and I'm find with that. 4D isn't a data analysis tool and I actually accept that part. But, yeah, I do get frustrated by some things, like, an incomplete JSON parser? Makes no sense to me. Anyway, 4D has a ton of features I love and I'm fluent in it enough to get things done quickly. It's absolutely my go-to tool for grinding and reprocessing data. It's great for that. And I don't think that's just because I know it already, I think it's actually pretty great at connecting to a huge range of systems and tweaking stuff. But, again, thanks for your long and thoughtful post, very much appreciated. P.S. I did a department-type document scanning program a few years back and it worked great. Used PDF Viewer for the PDFs in the system but, otherwise, it was pretty much just 4D. After much thought, I used the 'store data outside of data file' option and it worked out well. I had some concerns about the data getting scrambled after a recovery or something, so I also had a nightly job that exported all of the documents into a standard file structure tree. So, a bunch of nested folders grouped by client (or whatever) with the documents and an identifier. That made it easier to sleep at night ;-) It also gave us a traversable directory of documents that could be drag-and-dropped (or written to) a Web server directory. Kind of handy! ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:4d_tech-unsubscr...@lists.4d.com **********************************************************************
