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Re: [sanuk] More Questions

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Hi sanuk ....

Here is my opinion as an ordinary user confronted with the same problem. If I have understood your question correctly, the answer is "Yes, you can do it". It's what we have been doing.

Our data is all being imported from more than one source, mostly Links 2.0 and DBMan, so it is all Excel-compatible. We have used Excel to merge the data, assign sequential ID numbers, sorting, etc. By the way, your Excel columns should be formatted as "Text" so dates and numbers don't get corrupted -- the only exception should be text fields that have more than 255 characters of content.

If you want to use the LinksSQL direct import function, it is helpful to create a few dummy links first, then export them so you can compare them with your import file.

However, after experimenting, we found that the easiest way to do it is to use the "SQL Monitor" function of MySQLMan -- a miraculous program that is bundled with LinksSQL and is almost worth the license fee in its own right.

You can use SQL Monitor to import the whole of your data, or if you prefer, just the AltCategories (that is very easy to do).

Here is an outline of what we did ...

1. Set up your category and links tables to match the structure of your existing data. If you need new columns, it is easy to add them at this point.

2. Create a few dummy categories, including some sub-categories, and some that are related.

3. Create some dummy links, just enough to test your fields. The quickest way to do it is to add them directly to a category. Alternative categories are achieved with the link "copy" function (which does not copy the link record, it adds the link ID to the table which connects links to categories).

Step 1 depends on the complexity of your data, and is something you have to do anyway. Steps 2 and 3 should not take more than five minutes.

4. Use SQL Monitor to create a dump file of your LinksSQL tables. This is a file of MySQL commands that will completely re-create your tables and all the data in them. In practice, you don't need all the tables, just the four which contain your data: category, catlinks, catrelations, links. Use them as a model for your real data.

5. What you do next depends on what software you use, and how well you know it, so I won't go into detail. Our method is to copy the entire Excel worksheet into Textpad, then use search/replace to insert the SQL commands, replace tabs with commas, escape apostrophes, etc. You may need to experiment a bit at first -- but if you can do one, you can do 100,00.

6. Now all you have to do is tell SQL Monitor where to find the file. When it has finished, all your links are in the correct multiple categories. It all happens with impressive efficiency and speed.
Subject Author Views Date
Thread More Questions sanuk 5103 Mar 11, 2002, 9:14 PM
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Alex 5016 Mar 12, 2002, 1:35 AM
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curman 4986 Mar 12, 2002, 4:58 PM
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Alex 4988 Mar 12, 2002, 5:00 PM
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sanuk 4971 Mar 12, 2002, 11:38 PM
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pugdog 4928 Mar 14, 2002, 3:42 PM
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YoYoYoYo 4922 Mar 15, 2002, 1:17 AM