Exporting field Titles

[jimkent]

I'm wondering if there is an easy way to export field titles to a CSV? You know, the first line are the fields titles. I have 103 fields I need to export, I know I could set up a record number 1 and run a 103 line set field script that would set all 103 fields to the title (some of my exported fields are globals so that causes a problem I'll have to work out later). My guess is that there is an easier way to do this. This DB will be run on a weekly basis, therefore I need some sort of script for the user. Any thoughts? Thanks.

Version: Developer v6

Platform: Windows XP

[Lee Smith]

Use the Merge format to get the Field "Names" along with your data. Merge format is a comma separated text file.

You can script an export, and it will automatically name it the same name as you direct it to, and it will put it in the folder you choose each time, and you can do it all without dialog.

You really should play with the Export function in FileMaker and you can see may other possibilities of how it can work for you.

Lee

[jimkent]

Worked perfectly.... Thanks so much... I should have known about that file type (.mer) from my other programming days. My bad.

Thanks!

[jimkent]

Just when I thought it was fixed..... The merge file creates field names where it replaces the spaces with underscores "_". Therefore my other program which imports this merge file does not understand the field. Is there anyway to keep the field names with spaces in them? i.e. my field "Store Catagory" is comming out "Store_Catagory".

[Lee Smith]

You are correct, I forgot about the _ . There are two other formats, maybe one of those will do it for you.

If you type or copy and paste this into the Online Help (index window),

exporting,data, About file formats

It will give you all of the file types with a shor discription of what they are and both DIF and DBF formats include the fields (also the FileMaker format too)

HTH

Lee

[jimkent]

Just tried them both. DIF didn't export perfectly into a CSV format (some hidden stuff going on) and DBF Titles had underscores and they were all capitalized. hum... Is there a way to append a file in an export? I could use a template CSV with all the titles already entered.

[Lee Smith]

Hi Jim,

The reason this caught me a little off guard is, that I learn to name my fields a long time ago when there were limits to the sizes of things like the names of files and fields (especially in DOS), So I just don't have spaces in my field names. In fact, I often use the underscore_ in my field names to denote their type (i.e. c_ NameFull (calculation, text result) = NameFirst & " " & NameLast).

There is a paper by Core Solutions called "Standard.pdf" that you might want to take a look at. It is their in-house policies regarding field naming etc. that their developers have to follow. I use a similar approach in my files.

http://www.coresolutions.on.ca/Resources/standards.lasso

Perhaps this would be a good time to update your files, and change your field names.

HTH

Lee

Version: v6.x

Platform: Mac OS 9

[Lee Smith]

jimkent said:

Just when I thought it was fixed..... The merge file creates field names where it replaces the spaces with underscores "_". Therefore my other program which imports this merge file does not understand the field. Is there anyway to keep the field names with spaces in them? i.e. my field "Store Catagory" is comming out "Store_Catagory".

Couldn't you pass this through a Text editior such as BBEdit and do a find for the underscore and replace with a space and then import it into the other program.

Just a thought.

Lee

Version: v6.x

Platform: Mac OS 9

[jimkent]

Yes, I'm going the search and replace route. And I agree about the naming convention. I am kinda stuck though, the program that is importing the csv file is a large company's application and when I first saw it myself I kinda couldn't belive it. Some fields have spaces, some are two and three words concatenated together with no space and none have underscores. But what are you going to do? They are a multi-million dollar company and "they aren't changing". oh well. Thanks for your help!