Actinic Database Advice - Access 2003

[paulbeckett]

Hi All

I have very limited skills when it comes to Databases etc. so I was hoping the thing I am trying to do is quite simple! Can anyone give me some advice?

I currently have ALOT of subsections that all contain a text (price) in the Description field.

I want to remove the text in the Description field and put it into a custom property with the same subsection.

Doing this manually (e.g. deleting the text in the description field and then creating a custom poperty and entering the same text) will take alot of time.

Is there any way of grabing all the rows for the description field and then pasting them into the custom property field using Access or Excel?

Thanks for your help!

Paul

[NormanRouxel]

This is quite complex as you will need to manipulate several ActinicCatalog.mdb tables at the same time.

Before you go further, take note that you can only fit 255 characters into a Custom Property.

It might help if you tell us why you want to do this, as there may be alternatives to moving this data.

[paulbeckett]

Hi Norman

It is actually to use with your EXCELLENT NorPrice currency conversion patch. Following the successful implementation of your patch, I have all my products' pricing changing to the selected currency. Not only is this easy to do, it looks excellent.

However, each of my products are within a sub-section. And each sub-section has a price in the text of the description property. This price needs to currency convert as well.

Following reading a posting on your forum - I see that it is possible to do this using NorPrice. I simply created a customvar - GROSSGBPPRICE for the subsection. Removed the price from the Description property - and inputed it into the GROSSGBPPRICE custom property. Again, the results are excellent: http://www.kjbeckett.com/acatalog/acmestudio.html (click on the flag at this level to see all the prices change - the prices are now in the customvar - but any text is in the Description).

However I now need to do this for over a 1000 products. Happy to do it manually - but if I can do it using a copy and paste excercise - it would be alot better.

Paul

[NormanRouxel]

I see you've got the latest NorPrice version running with individual icons to set particular currencies.

It would have to be some complex Access query. The problem is that you don't have that Custom Property set at all on most Sections. This means that the query would have to create an entry in the ProductProperties table (if it didn't already exist) as well as set it's value.

The relevant tables are Product, HTMLVariables and ProductProperties.

I don't know enough about Access to be able to help further, but the above might point an Access guru to the right places.

[NormanRouxel]

PS. I see that I recently answered this in more detail in another post. http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=18173 applies.

[paulbeckett]

Hi Norman

Thanks for this - although I dont think I was clear in conveying what I am struggling to do. If there is any Access gurus out there I would appreciate your advice.

I have set-up a custom property called GROSSGBPPRICE. At the moment none of my subsections (except the test subsection - see link) contain the GROSSGBPPRICE property or the data that need to go into it.

To mannually create the GROSSGBPPRICE property is a big task because I have over 1000 subsections.

Therefore I am trying to understand if I can do this in the database instead of the Actinic GUI.

Once (if) the GROSSGBPPRICE property is created I would then copy the contents of the subsection "Description" property into the GROSSGBPPRICE property.

(Norman - I no longer need to do an automatic update as in my previous posting - because I have worked out a simplier way of doing things).

Paul

[paulbeckett]

Actually I think I am confusing things here. This is probably an easier question:

Where (which table) would I find the Subsection custom properties within the ActincCatalog file?

Paul

[NormanRouxel]

Section Properties are held in the (confusingly named) ProductProperties table. Of course, Product Properties are in there as well. Other fields like nType determine exactly what sort of Property it is.