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   Specific Situations

   The power of the CFTS text searching system stems from its inherent 
   flexibility. CFTS creates a searchable index from strings of text. The 
   source of the input strings, and how they are formed is entirely under 
   the control of the application programmer. Unlike Clipper's native 
   indexing function, CFTS indexes are not tightly bound to Clipper's 
   basic data types, nor does CFTS know anything about how Clipper stores 
   data.

   At first, this might be seen as a hindrance to rapid program 
   development, but when you combine CFTS with Clipper's powerful 
   built-in string manipulation features it is, in fact, quite easy to 
   put CFTS to work to accomplish tasks with Clipper that otherwise would 
   be difficult or impossible. Tasks like searching memo fields, 
   searching multiple fixed-length fields with one call, and searching 
   across related .DBFs are easy to implement using CFTS. In fact, the 
   BIB demonstration program supplied on the distribution diskette 
   accomplishes all three of these jobs with just one active CFTS index! 
   (Please examine and modify BIB.PRG as you see fit. It is provided to 
   illustrate one way to make CFTS useful to you, but it by no means 
   exhausts the possibilities of the library.)

   The following discussions and the sample pseudo-code are not 
   intended to be a definitive statement on how to use CFTS, but 
   rather as a jumping off spot to help you get started using CFTS to 
   solve some common problems that regularly confront Clipper 
   programmers.