UniDAC and Broken DBF Headers
Universal Data Access Components (UniDAC ) as of version 7.5.13 (released 24th of June 2019) have a DBF Specific Option IgnoreMetadataErrors. This option simply helps to ignore table definition errors. One may ask “What is metadata?”
Metadata meaning here is format of table structure. DBF tables has “header” and “data” sections in brief. Header part contains metadata of that table. dBase has evolved in time. For that reason, DBF has a lot of different formats (like dBaseIII, dBaseIV, dBaseV, dBase7, dBase10, dBase for Windows, HiPer-Six, FoxPro 2, Visual FoxPro). Each new format introduced has some new enhancements over previous one.
dBase is still a commercial product as of today (See: http://www.dbase.com/dbasesql/ ) Owner company only made…