CSPro Users Forum

Hi,
I'm working on an app to collect prices for CPI, and of course I want to compare to the prices last month. Hence I have an external dictionary with a csdb file of the relevant data.
And each month, I want to get rid of the data that I don't need anynore. I can't just delete the datafile as it's already opened in the app, so I tried to loop through it using delcase on every observation before reading the new data from a tab separated file.
This work-ish, but I notice that the datafile grows despite the number of occurences stays approximately the same, and this is of course a worry in the long run.

Any other suggestion on how to do it? (I guess I could make a separate app which does not open the dictionary and use this to delete the datafile, but this is also not very elegant..

Anne

Cases deleted from the .csdb file actually aren't removed. They're simply marked as deleted. However, unless you're syncing that data to a server, then the size of the file isn't that important. The .csdb file has indices on several fields so operating on it should be of a similar speed regardless of how much data is in the file.

However, if you do want to truly delete everything in the file, you should be able to do this:

As the data file grew by almost 1 Mb per month, I feel it's safer to delete the data, as they're not used anymore anyway..

And the "create" argument worked perfectly. Thank you! Would never have thought about it..

A