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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
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Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

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Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
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Data Migration

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    #1

    Data Migration

    I have used Alpha 4 for years and have hand entered most of my data. I work with Music (MP3) and Video (MPEG2). The volume of data has increased, I can't keep up hand entering new music and video's.
    I would like to upgrade to Alpha 5.
    I beed to know if there is a data migration module or plug in. ie, I have over 30,000 MP3's on my hard drive. I would like to have Alpha 5 read this data from my drive and enter "Song Title" "Artist" "Song Length" and etc.
    Is this possible? Help!

    Terry T
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: Data Migration

    Terry,

    A5 reads A4 tables directly if this answers the question.

    Just copy the existing tables into a new folder for A5 and use them as-is or modify them if necessary. You can also append the old data into a new table if you have already created a new table. In fact, this is often a good idea just to make sure you catch records that don't meet the current rules. (Of course, if it doesn't meet the current rules, it won't be appended but it will be stored in a separate table called "violated" and a memo will be added which describes why it wasn't able to be appended.)

    If you are trying to read some "data" from somewhere else on your system, more info is needed. Is the data in a database format? Is it in spreadsheet format? Is it all in one folder? Is it a matter of reading a bunch of files and pulling data out somehow? Is the data in a consistent format? (Good luck if the format isn't consistent. If not, that would be like telling a robot to pick up and dispose of anything in your house that isn't wanted but not creating an exact list of what isn't wanted. Then, by the time you've created the list you might as well have done the job yourself. In other words, you may have to keep typing!)

    Comment

      #3
      RE: Data Migration

      While A5 will be able to use the A4 data tables that Terry has already hand entered, I think that the question is whether there is a way that A5 can scan new media files, extract the title, artist and playing time data and create new records in her table, eliminating the need for her to do the data entry manually. I don't have the expertise to answer this question, but hopefully someone else will.

      Sherrill

      Comment

        #4
        RE: Data Migration

        Sherrill,

        If the format of the media file header is fixed the file could be read using byte by byte and the information available there parsed by Alpha Five.

        I think it more likely that she'll have an easier time of it if she shops for a third party utility that will strip the desired information out for her, and then store it in a text file, which Alpha could then parse. I suspect that there are some 'catalog building' utilities out there somewhere for her to investigate.

        --- tom

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