Importing data into RevDB

[David Coker]

>A note of caution when using this.
>The chunking rules for Rev are that a line can contain items, but  
>items cannot contain lines.
>Lines can contain items, items contain words.
>   wrong =  line 6 of item 4, no matter the delimiter
>
>Not all functions obey a new setting.
>Filter does not follow the linedelimiter, and always uses CR, as does  
>Sort.
>
>   wrong  = set the worddelimiter to comma
>... since the Rev definition for a word delimiter is white space, not  
>a single character.
>
>I have found this useful on occasion when extracting data (such as CSV  
>and html) to handle 'embedded returns' in order to keep logical groups  
>of amorphous data together.  Another use is to demark field content as  
>lines such as
>
>write the contents of the fields of a card to a text file
>
>set the lineDel to "^"
>put field "Title" into outputBuffer
>put field "Description" into line 2 of outputBuffer
>put field "Inventory" into line 3 of outputBuffer
>put field "Prices" into line 12 of outputBuffer
>set the lineDel to cr
>put outputBuffer into url ("file:" & aPath & aFilename)
>
>Also as a utility function to make a run of characters.
>put characterString("*", 25) into line 2 of field "studentNotes"
>put characterString(space, 10) after line 6 of field "studentNotes"
>
>function characterString charToUse, stringLength
>    set the lineDel to charToUse
>    put charToUse into line stringLength of tempp
>    return tempp
>end characterString
>    -- now that we are leaving this function
>    -- the lineDel setting evaporates
>    -- it only applies to this function
>    -- the same way itemDel behaves
>The same thing can be done with itemDel
>
>    set the itemDel to "^"
>    put "^" into item 25 of tempp
>    set the itemDel to comma
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>Jim Ault
>Las Vegas

Jim, Kay, Tom... all who have replied so far.

I really appreciate all of the tips and suggestions and will probably enjoy taking some of them for a serious test run eventually. Unthinking, I started the update process on my previously mentioned database here on my primary development machine, which has been tied up for 34+ hours now. 

Performance has already degraded somewhat, so I've pretty much made this thing off limits until it has completed. (Assuming that it actually will at some point.)

Much appreciated good folks! Hope you all have a great weekend. :-)

David C.