Well,
It's late and I didn't reach my goal of seeing the combination of drawfiles take place tonight.
Wasted time earlier when I couldn't get the midday draw to load. Turns out the file was empty. Lost about 2 hours of programming for nothing. Without that I could have got it up and running.
Looking good so far. Have to code the actual combining later. There are a couple of runtime errors that need resolved. They only pop up when the instructions are not followed. So they will be a high priority.
The greatest thing I did tonight was set up an inspection algorithm that compares the two drawfiles for length, game type etc. I found out that there were two missing winning numbers in my evening and one in my midday drawfiles. Without the inspection algorithm I wouldn't have known. (each goes back to 1999)
It won't be impossible to combine draws if you have, for instance, only one draw on sunday. The program will tell you if they are of unequal length. However you won't be able to tell if there are draws missing. You'll have to trust your source in that case.
The screenshot above now says "Inspect Drawfiles" in lieu of "Merge Drawfiles".... The "Merge Drawfiles" button becomes available only after both drawfiles pass inspection.
Both these drawfiles load very fast - under 5 seconds. My mainform takes forever to load just one. It could be because the mainform has RTB's instead of LB's. Nothing I can do to fix that though.
Too long winded, maybe. Just wanted to share my progress.