Hi there,

I have very little information regards to the .max files, and asked to find out if WF can read them.
I know many of you are very experinced in WF environment, even a "NO" would be appreciated.

Thanks,


Hua

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

What is the source of the .max files ?

What produced them ?

A quick Google search for '.max extension' ( http://filext.com/file-extension/MAX ) shows a bunch of scanner and 3D app type files, but nothing of a data association.

So I would guess that they might be typos of '.mas', which is a very common Focus extension.

Did you look inside a .max file to see what is there ?

And there appears also to exist a compression utility (much like winzip) by the name of Max. It might result in files with the extension of .max.
In that case you might want to try to uncompress the file(s) with the evaluation version of the program. Otherwise, I wouldn't know what it could be else than the suggestion Dave gave.

I have not yet see the files. A wild guess is they are scanned engineering drawings.

How would you expect WebFOCUS to read a scanned drawing? It can only read data files. The only way you'll get that is to convert the image into a format that can be stored in a BLOB field, but you'll still need to have a database somewhere.

Assuming the end-user has some application on their machine that can open the "Max" files, you could simply create a link to these files and allow the end-users PC to find the appropriate program and open them.

If you're looking to display the output of the max file in a report you will need to convert it to some other format as people have suggested.

I have generally found that the easiest way to convert formats is typically to convert something to PDF using a PDF printer:

e.g.
http://www.cutepdf.com/

or

http://www.primopdf.com/

Both the above resources are free and add a utility as a printer to "print" the PDF.

If you need it in some image format (e.g. JPEG, TIFF, etc), there are a lot of free utilities to convert a PDF to other formats.

While this does require many steps the chances of finding a max -> JPEG converter may be extremely unlikely, while you could print a MAX file and convert the PDF to another format relatively easily.

It might also be possible to create a batch file or something else that could automate this process.

Thanks,
Doug Logan

Thank you Doug for your reply.

As I mentioned before, we don't know much about the files. Now I found that these files are database files created by Maximizer. We have the backup files but do not have the application.
This is a one time process and things are still evolving.

I apologize for misleading you previously. Thanks everyone for your help.

Hua

Based on what I can find on the internet:

http://cicorp.com/maximizer/convert/FromSend/

.MAX files are in "Pervasive Data Engine" format.

This table might be useful to you:
http://cicorp.com/maximizer/files/index.htm

In Googling the "Pervasive Data Engine", this forum post makes reference to reading data in that format using their SDK:

http://cs.pervasive.com/forums...231/15828.aspx#15828

It also seems that Pervasive has trial versions of their database product:
http://www.pervasivedb.com/Dat...s/Pages/Default.aspx

Between the two of those it seems you should be able to put something together to get some sort of SQL database together that WebFOCUS should be able to query.

WebFOCUS can't read the .MAX files directly, but if there is a database that can read the files it should be able to report off of it.

Thanks,
Doug Logan

Ok, in further research I believe that the "Pervasive Database Engine" uses btrieve format.

If this is in fact true, here are two tools I found on Download.com that might be able to extract the data directly from the file:

http://download.cnet.com/BtSea...0254_4-10065023.html

http://download.cnet.com/Conve...0254_4-10110067.html

Thanks,
Doug Logan

Doug

Thanks a lot for all the information. Let me take some time to look at it.

Have a nice day.

Hua