How to Add Fields to a Table in Visual FoxPro Programmatically

• Microsoft Visual FoxPro for Windows, version 3.0

SUMMARY

In previous versions of FoxPro, the only way to alter the structure of a table programmatically was to create a new table that contained the new structure and then append the data from the old table.

Visual FoxPro now includes the ALTER TABLE command, which allows you to alter the structure of an existing table programmatically. This article shows by example how to add a field to an existing table.

MORE INFORMATION

This example uses the Customer.dbf table that is part of the Testdata.dbc database. These files are located in the \Vfp\Samples\Data directory. The following code adds a new field named Newfield to the Customer.dbf table. The new field is a character field with a width of 20.

   OPEN DATA testdata
   USE customer
   ALTER TABLE customer ADD COLUMN Newfield C(20)

For more information on the ALTER TABLE command, please see the ALTER TABLE command topic in the Visual FoxPro Help file.