[AccessD] Access error

Max,

When I lived up in Connecticut I used to go to the local Access user's group which was hosted at 
Microsoft's suite.  One day I gave a short and sweet lecture about classes and frameworks.  There 
was a gentleman there who heard the lecture and apparently wrote my name down because three years 
later I get a call from him.  His business is booming and he no longer has time to do the database 
stuff.

Not exactly sales, and yet kind of sales, yea.

The client is doing pretty cool stuff.  He gets Medicaid drug invoices, uses Omnipage and OCR to rip 
the stuff out into CSV files, then he imports those csv files into an access database and does 
analysis for his clients.  As you might imagine the invoices are all over the map in terms of 
format.  My job is to write code to extract this field from this line and another field from another 
line and these 8 fields from the next N lines, and then recognize page breaks etc. and write them 
into a table in a consistent format.

So far we have identified 5 different formats that I have written extraction code for, and there 
others that he has stumbled across as he works.  I write a class for each format, each class has 
logic to find the right field(s) in the right line(s) to get the data out, and then write the data 
back to a standard table.  Each class looks very similar to every other such class except that that 
search logic is slightly different, and the "This source field goes in this destination field" is 
slightly different.

And then of course there is data correction to fix OCR errors.  Ones get turned into L and I, zero 
gets turned into o and O etc.  I find and fix these errors in the code as I move the data.

Fun stuff.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com


Max Wanadoo wrote:
> Aha!  So you have been doing SALES.
> 
> Well done - picking them up in this economic climate is pretty good.  I hope
> it means that things are getting back to normality.
> 
> Max