Data Truncated

[PeterThake]

Spent a day recreating the unique Product Reference fields in Actinic using manual typing, cut and paste and also by importing Excel spreadsheets of data. Made a snapshot, called it a night.

Got up, tried to open Actinic and got a simple "Data Truncated" error dialogue. No other info. Tried the other sugestions on other threads: repair and compact using Access, repair and compat using the Mole End Spell Check software. btw this software (trial version) did not report any fields as being too long. Unless I was missing something.

I think I have solved this: I went into Access and checked the Product Reference field and it was set as a text length 30 field. Since the help file suggest this is limited to 20 characters I reset this in Access to Text len 20 and it now starts up ok.

So a question: how had I managed to screw up the data? I had not messed with the Access dbase prior to this. Does the Import Excel spreadsheet function allow fields which are too long to be imported? More importantly, does this actually reset the default field values in Access or are they set to 30 chars in Access and only allowed to process 20 chars in Actinic??

Final question: on looking at my Access Products data table, a lot of the products have exclamation marks (!) in the Product Reference names. eg. the field is '1!Counterweights' but only appears as 'Counterweights' when viewed in Actinic. Not all the fields feature this ! mark, but plenty do, especially those at the top of the table. Is this some thing I should be worried about?

[Duncan Rounding]

Product Ref field is Text size 30 by default - not sure if Actinic can't process more than 20 though.

The ! mark indicates it is a duplicate.
For example 1!Ref23 would be the first duplciate of Ref23; 3!Ref23 would be the third duplicate of Ref23.

[RuralWeb]

I would contact Bruce as he is looking at some snapshots of mine that showed a similar problem.

[Jan]

I think I have solved this: I went into Access and checked the Product Reference field and it was set as a text length 30 field. Since the help file suggest this is limited to 20 characters I reset this in Access to Text len 20 and it now starts up ok.

30 is the correct size, from the sound of things you somehow managed to create a field that was to big (from importing I would guess), changing the field size in Actinic would cause the reference field to truncate to 20 and therefore allow Actinic to open but you may have corrupted some of your duplicates.

Regards,

[PeterThake]

Truncated data problem not solved!

Duncan - thanks for that. How do you know all this? Is it documented anywhere? Maybe this has something to do with why the fields have grown too long (does this hidden text count towards the final field length?)

Jan, you were quite right, my duplicates are all wrong now. Actinic crashes when I try to update the duplicates. The parent>child relationship is all mucked up.

Malcolm, I will take your advice - this is a live shop and I have lost enough income as it is

Bruce, can I raise this as a ticket via here or do I need to call?

Cheers everyone.

[PeterThake]

Update

For anyone watching this thread, I have sent the offending access .mda file to Actinic Support who are looking at it for me. One suggestion was to reinstal the Microsoft MDAC but this did not help. No solution yet, but it has only been 24 hours.

Meanwhile I am using an older .mda file to keep my store open while they fix the newer one. I am assured I will be able to import the orders received into the fixed file when I get it back. Bit of a pain though, in the meantime I cannot add any new products or maintain the web site. Unless anyone knows any different...?