Find records altered after a specific date?

Archived from groups: alt.comp.sys.palmtops.pilot,comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

see.my.sig.4.addr@nowhere.com.invalid wrote in
news:10phr05lfd858v81qd0654qmm2re1ldp64@4ax.com:

> Is there any way to search for records altered on or after a specific
> date? Can be on Palm or Palm Desktop, just as long as it works. I
> don't see any way, can anybody else?

Records in which application?

--
Regards,

Stan

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 16:00:28 -0800,
see.my.sig.4.addr@nowhere.com.invalid wrote:

> Is there any way to search for records altered on or after a specific
> date? Can be on Palm or Palm Desktop, just as long as it works. I don't
> see any way, can anybody else?

In general, no, but it would depend on the application and how
records are defined. Most applications store multiple records in a
single file, so if any record is modified, the date/time of the
entire file is changed. This wouldn't allow you to identify any
individual record(s) that might have changed.

One way to find altered records (which would be too impractical
for most people) would be to periodically extract all of an app's
records to a text file. So if, for example, you want to compare
today's contents of the address book, you'd extract another text
file and compare it with one of the previously saved copies. There
are utilities that can help, such as the file comparison utilities
provided with most software version control systems, but it would
still be laborious, wouldn't show the dates that changes were made,
and in this example, the exported data would be in the VCard format
which doesn't include any notes that were linked to the address book
records.

In some cases you can find programs that will help (but these
wouldn't provide after-the-fact solutions). One that works with the
address book is titled, IIRC, SuperNames. It didn't add any new
data files, and used the standard Palm ADDRESS.DAT file, at least in
the version I saw several years ago. It automatically updated a
date/time stamp (hidden, but accessible if the normal Palm
AddressBook app. was used) when the record was updated. For doing
what you want, this had several limitations, one being that you'd
have to manually scroll through all of the records looking for date
stamps more recent than a given date. Another is that it probably
only kept track of changes to address book notes, but I'm not
completely sure about this. Lastly, it wouldn't help you to find
changes made to any other app's records.