Discrepancies with site after importing snapshot

[jizepi]

I'm exporting a site snapshot from 6.1.3 and then importing it into 6.1.3 on a different machine. However, some of the product descriptions seem to be inheriting two peculiar characters at the end of the description (see screenshot). What could be causing this?

[NormanRouxel]

These are probably Carriage Return / Line Feed pairs.

If that's so then the product descriptions will probably take up an extra line on-screen when you look at the generated pages.

How they got into the snapshot, and how you can get rid of them I don't know (personally I'm too wary of snapshot problems to use it much).

I usually copy sites between systems by installing identical Actinics and then copying Site1 between the two systems plus a copy and paste of the info in Housekeeping / Security

Norman

[jizepi]

Why?

Any idea what's made them appear when all I've done is export a snapshot, and then import it again on the other machine?

[NormanRouxel]

That was fast. I edited my post while you were replying. See above.

Norman

[jizepi]

Thanks, but that didn't make any difference. It's stumped me. I looked at the databases and it all looks the same. Very strange.

Looks like I'll have to go and edit the descriptions in Actinic individually.

Thanks again.

Mike

[Jan]

Mike is using my product replication system to duplicate products in his database. This means that he is using the external linking feature of Actinic.

Have you installed product replication on your other system? (To do this and keep your data, install it and then copy the mdb and xls files over manually from the old machine).

When you first use Actinic's external linking feature a copy of all of the records is made in Actinic, the records will contain the values for the products at that point. When you use Actinic the products details are then taken directly from the external source. If you then turn off external linking then your previously externally linked products will still be available in Actinic but you will have the original products. The Actinic copy records are updated when you do certain things - for example I think that printing a catalog detail report will cause them to be updated or even switching linking on and off might do it.

If you do have to go an remove the products from the database, you should be able to do this fairly easily by opening the database up in Access, open the table called products, select the fields and then use the replace function to get rid of them all in one go.

Regards,

[jizepi]

Fixed it - it seems the 2 spurious characters were indeed carriage return and linefeed characters.

I'd pasted the original descriptions in from an Excel spreadsheet cell, and they'd been there all the time. (Strange that the original site doesn't show them as visible squares like the import does...). Anyway, opened the product details and did 2 backspaces from the end of the description, and voila. All sorted.

Thanks for your help Norman & Jan - much appreciated. What would us Actinic developers do without you two?

Mike