DB emailed to desktop has no attachment...

[BevM]

I've been searching here to resolve my problem with my Android phone no longer syncing with the desktop. I've gotten far enough to gather that the problem was with an upgrade in the Android version, and to wish to try the option to email the Droid version to my desktop. My problem is that the email received has no attachment. It just looks like plain text to me, with each item listed in the email. I can't for the life of me figure out how to merge that with the desktop version. I've emailed more than one DB, and I've emailed to both a Gmail and a Yahoo mail account...same deal, plain text, no attachment.

Thanks for any help!

BevM

[curtterp]

Sounds like to me that you went and emailed records, instead of emailing the database itself.

To email the database, go to the database list screen.
Long press the database you want to email.
Select email from the popup menu.

It will ask you which email account to use. Choose an email and you will have an email with the database attached.

[curtterp]

Another way of syncing would be to make use of Google Drive. You will need to install the Google Drive application on your desktop and Android device.

Here is my workflow with Google Drive.

Setup

• Install Google Drive on the Desktop computer (download it from http://drive.google.com)
• Install Google Drive on your Android Device from the Google Play Store

Workflow - Desktop

• Copy your databases from My Documents to Google Drive
• To open documents in HanDBase, use the browse command to navigate to Google Drive. Location in Windows 7 is C:\users\%USERID%\Google Drive (where %USERID% is your logon ID to windows). I think on Windows XP, the location would be C:\Documents and Settings\%USERID%\Google Drive, but I don't have an XP machine to verify the theory
• Once you open a database in Google Drive with the Desktop, the Save command will save it to the same location

Workflow - Android Device

• To open a database on Google Drive, open the Google drive app. Press on the database. A window will open saying downloading and give a progress bar. Once the download is done, HanDBase will open a screen saying successful. Press OK. If you already have the database on the device, HanDBase will merge the two databases (similar to emailing a database to the device).
  To put the database back out to Google Drive, from the database list screen, Long Press the database and choose email on the popup list. Choose Google Drive on the next popup list.

Known Issues
There are a couple of issues that is known from testing this procedure on Google Drive.

• Sending a database from the drive to Google Drive, if the same database is out on Google Drive, the original will not be deleted, but a copy will be made on Google Drive. There are two workarounds for this. One is to go to Google Drive and delete the original before saving the database back out. This is a little cumbersome, but it prevents always having to use the browse command to open the database on the desktop. If you do not delete the original first, the copy will have the name with a {1} after it. Google drive on the device does not show this (I think because it suppresses the number). If you just use the recent files option on the desktop, you will not be opening the newest file. The second work around is to delete the oldest file after you send a database to Google Drive.
• After sending a database from the device, if you try to open it again from the device, you will get an error that the file cannot be opened. The work around for this is to open the database on the desktop, then view a record. This will enable the save command on the desktop. You do not have to edit the record, just open it. After saving, then the database can be opened by the device again.
• There are no automatic backups on the desktop (when you used to sync, there was a backup made after every sync). The workaround is to copy the database from Google Drive to another folder on your desktop. You will have to manually change the name to copy multiple versions of the file.

That is all there is to it. Yes it is not as easy as just plugging in the device and press sync, but it is a way to get data from the databases back and forth. Hopefully Dave will be able to update Android to use Google Drive in a better way than the standard OS works with Google Drive. I have no clue if it is on the radar yet, but one can hope .

Then again, emailing back and forth from desktop to device could be a more elegant solution. I just never emailed from device to desktop to sync. I have emailed from desktop to device with good sync results. But most of the time, my sync is more of a backup since I do not do a lot of data entry from the desktop, most of the work is on my devices.

[dhaupert]

Indeed as Curt surmised, it sounds like you emailed records, rather than the entire database.

Curt's Google Drive solution is a good workaround to consider as well, with the current caveats he mentioned. I personally use the email feature more than a cloud solution but mainly because I like having the email attachment around as a backup. When you send things into the cloud setup, you have just a single file there, and if there was something to ever go wrong, you may wind up with no backups. In fact, I often just email a few of the databases to myself with no intentions of ever opening if I'm about to make some major modifications and just want a backup.

That said a better solution is in development now- due to the way Android OS changed and we can no longer support the conduit we wrote, a new solution is being developed that makes use of the Cloud and offers true syncing both. Stay tuned for more!




Blessings,
Dave Haupert
dhaupert@ddhsoftware.com http://www.ddhsoftware.com

[BevM]

Curt, you were absolutely right, I was using the wrong email function. Amazingly, once I did it correctly it worked!

I will examine the Google solution posted as well. However, the idea of having backups created via those emails is attractive. I do remember to back up my DBs once in a while, but not as often as I should.

Thanks for all the help!

BevM