Database queries

[Angi]

Hi There,

Can anyone tell me what the character limitation is for the product description and the extended info text when importing a .CSV as my client is receiving a truncating error?

Also is it possible to add extra fields in the ActinicCatalog.mdb file that Actinic will ignore? as my client has one he uses for the shop as well and he would like to combine them if possible.

Thanks
Angi

[Duncan Rounding]

Product Reference is a text field and limited to 30 characters (Including any duplicate prefixing such as: '20!xxxxx...'). Product Full Description and Extended Info Text is limited by Excel 2003 to 255 charcters but is a memo field in Actinic. I think Excel 2007 can handle a larger cell character count but not sure of the limit.

[Mark H]

I've never had a truncating error with the product description, and we include quite a lot of HTML sometimes. How many characters are you trying to import in that field?

[fergusw]

In access memo fields the limits are "65,535 when entering data through the user interface; 1 gigabyte when entering data programmatically." *source

Regarding adding extra fields:
I would recommend adding and extra lookup table(s).
i.e. Add a table with [product reference] [extra field data] columns where the product reference relates to the [product reference] field in the products table. You can then create a database view ("query" in access) which pulls the product table and your lookup table together to give you all the data. This saves you mucking around with actinic tables, gives you greater flexibility and ensures future upgrades only require a copy/paste of the new tables/views.

[Mark H]

Database question - it is dangerous to mess with the mdb file directly unless youare an expert. I would be tempted to add a custom variable in Actinic and see where it pops up in the database file, so you are adding data to the mdb indirectly via Actinic/CSV, but not using that data in Actinic.

[Mark H]

Back to square one, where is the .csv file coming from, Actinic database or Excel spreadsheet?

[Angi]

Oh I think its about 1000 characters.

[Duncan Rounding]

Back to square one, where is the .csv file coming from, Actinic database or Excel spreadsheet?

This was essentially my thought - if it's Excel 2003 then that would account for the truncation if over 255 characters.

[I-CC]

If the issue you have is lots of #########'s appearing instead of your text when saving as a csv file in excel, then grab a copy of openoffice from the web and use that for creating the csv files as it does not suffer from the hashing of content when it reaches a certain number of characters, which excel suffers from.

[Mark H]

If the issue you have is lots of #########'s appearing instead of your text when saving as a csv file in excel, then grab a copy of openoffice from the web and use that for creating the csv files as it does not suffer from the hashing of content when it reaches a certain number of characters, which excel suffers from.

We managed to get rid of that by formatting the cells as "general" rather than "text" in Excel, but I suspect we might have been lucky on the day.......

[Jan]

Product Reference is a text field and limited to 30 characters

Product reference is limited to 20 characters actually, the 30 char field length is just there to allow the couple of extras characters for duplicates.

The product description max size is 20000 chars.

The fields are limited in size by the executable program not the database, if you overstep the expected length then you may get data truncated errors when running the program (usually on start up to be honest).

Regards,