Having Fun with External Linking

[DBurrows]

Finally getting round to external linking today (on a spare coupe of PCs), i have copied my "real" actinic database to a shared location on a computer and renamed it, then i proceeded to link all the fields that actinic requires to (what i hope) the correct fields in the external database - all seems well so far except that upon opening Actinic all my product sections are not there, instead are the sections from Actinics "Demo Store", this leaves me with loads of unallocated external products.
Have i linked something incorrectly or is there something i have done incorrectly?


Many Thanks - hope to get this cracked today!

[DBurrows]

It appears by doing a site import before inputting the external links has sorted it, howver this leads me to believe that the actual sections and subsections are not exeternally linked and would possibly cause problems when taking orders etc.

Can anyone offer any suggestions

(sorry for quick posting, i am writing these as i go!)

[Pneumatus]

That's correct... only products are externally linked - not sections. When you add a _new_ product to the database and actinic sees it, it will be put in an 'Unallocated External Products' section where you need to move it into the correct section.

[DBurrows]

OK lovely, im trying to add a new product now but it seems to to add it to the local database not the external one - im guessing it is something really simple....

[Jan]

If you want to add products to your external database you will need to add them outside of Actinic and then link them into Actinic - if your database is actually Actinic and you are renaming the database, you will have to either recopy the database after changes have been made or you could change the ODBC connection on the developement machine to point to the database with the new name.

Although Actinic only allows you to link to external products, once you have them in the right place (either by dragging or dropping them into the right place or by importing your website from the other machine) they will be updated in the correct place.

Regards,

[DBurrows]

Presumably i can delete all the tables other than the products one in my external database (seeing as this external DB was once a standard Actinic DB) and all the fields that are not linked in the products table?

[Jan]

Deleting the unused tables should be fine - if you then compact and repair the database, it will probably reduce in size by quite a bit.

Regards,