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I'm back with another import/export problem: (HDB 4.1.6 on a Palm Centro smartphone, HDB Desktop 4.1.5 on PC/XP)

I export a database/table from Alpha Five (Ver 8) to a text .csv file. Three "logical" fields have "T"s and "F"s in them. The "T"s and "F"s show correctly in both a listing in Alpha Five and the .csv file viewed in Excel.

I then import the .csv into an existing HDB .pdb database where those three fields are "Checkboxes", and ALL the boxes are checked -- meaning that, effectively, all the "F"s have become "T"s.

Is there an simple way to avoid this? I'm guessing that if I went into the database in Excel and replaced all the "F"s with blanks " "s and THEN imported, the resulting "false" checkboxes would be UNchecked?

Jim

Shepherd Jim wrote:I'm back with another import/export problem: (HDB 4.1.6 on a Palm Centro smartphone, HDB Desktop 4.1.5 on PC/XP)

I export a database/table from Alpha Five (Ver 8) to a text .csv file. Three "logical" fields have "T"s and "F"s in them. The "T"s and "F"s show correctly in both a listing in Alpha Five and the .csv file viewed in Excel.

I then import the .csv into an existing HDB .pdb database where those three fields are "Checkboxes", and ALL the boxes are checked -- meaning that, effectively, all the "F"s have become "T"s.

Is there an simple way to avoid this? I'm guessing that if I went into the database in Excel and replaced all the "F"s with blanks " "s and THEN imported, the resulting "false" checkboxes would be UNchecked?

Jim

Hi Jim,

Good question. When a CSV is imported, anything other than a blank value or a zero value is treated as checked. So you have a few options to get that data in there then.

You could do as you mentioned- do a search and replace to change it on the Alpha Five side.
You could import as a text field in HanDBase and then add a conditional field that says if the text field is F the value is 0, otherwise, it's 1. Then after setting that field up and the program recalculated, you can convert the conditional to a checkbox and get the right values.

Hope one of these work for you!

dhaupert wrote:
Hi Jim,

Good question. When a CSV is imported, anything other than a blank value or a zero value is treated as checked.

Has something changed since you wrote this, or did you get it wrong? I just did an import with checkbox fields. The csv file had -1 for the checked values, and blank for unchecked. All the blank values imported as checked resulting in all the boxes in the HB db being checked. I went into the csv file and changed all the blank values to zero and then they imported as unchecked.

I honestly don't remember changing that, but it is an almost 4 year old post, so a lot has happened since then! It sounds like the program is specifically looking for a 0 for unchecked to me.

If I remember correctly 1 will set the checkbox and 0 will leave it unchecked.
Not sure when this change was made, but in my last testing of this feature it seems this was the case.

Great Post. Thanks for this valuable information.