Access* help

[Toby G]

Hi

I would like some help on how to make an Access database of my orders.
Not sure where to start really...

I would liket to be able to simply see all the orders:

prices, creditcard #'s, products, customer names and addresses etc

Do I use ActinicCatalog.mdb in Access and go from there? There are so many tables! Which ones should I be using? How do I start?

Toby
I have Actinic v8.5.0.0....

[Duncan Rounding]

I don't recommend you mess with the Actinic database. Backup first whatever you do.

You could export your orders to csv files and import them into tables in your own database.

[completerookie]

1st things 1st, make backups, make another backup, and then to be safe, take another one.
finally, copy the actinic database into its own folder, and play with that one until you are 100% confident you know what you are doing.

Actinic is a complex database, and you risk your actinic catalog going down the pan if you mess with it wrongly - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, and you are on your own if it does screw it up, hence the backup warnings

create a brand new database within ms-access and then link tables from the copy of the actinic database file to this new database. - if you don't know how to do this, then your'e not ready for access/actinic database reading

look at the table names within the actinic db , and most of them make sense as to their contents
the following tables are initially important to you, but by no means an exhaustive list.

• Catalog Section - this is the main sections
• Product - this is the main product table
• Customer
• Order
• Order*
• Payment*
• Person
• Address

the hardest part is getting the options for each of the products, but is possible,

look for the tables, follow some of the columns and then look at the contents, after a while, the contents become clear because you can see the contents within the actual actinic products, and if you create a new dummy product, then you can follow the additions as each option is added.

within the Product table, look at the nDuplicateIndex column, this indicates whether you are looking at a duplicate, with sOriginalProdRef pointing to the original refernence - theroretcally, you may be able to ignore those

most of the keys are obvious, and within an hour of playing, you should have some simple queries.
make sure you ONLY read the information, never change the actinic database

make heavy use of static queries,
I ended up making a query with the most important actinic bits in it, and then used that query whenever I wanted info from actinic.

kevin

[Toby G]

Thank you both for your help.

I will make lots of backups!