Sesame Library | Sesame ODBC and Export Options

Continual progress has been the keyword in Sesame's development. At this writing (late October 2001) we are now in the process of assembling a team of qualified beta testers (from among several hundred registered beta tester applicants) that will take Sesame through its paces and give us the feedback we need to complete the product development cycle.

Our Sesame ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) has been developed to the point that Microsoft Word can now read a Sesame database! This means that you will be able to merge your database information using Sesame's own merge facilities or from inside Microsoft Office products.

An important component of a good database manager is the product's ability to share its data across platforms and programs. ODBC is a major milestone in accomplishing that. Another is the ability to export data in a format that is usable by other products and systems. The standard is to be able to easily export database information in a variety of widely-accepted ASCII formats. Q&A is competent in this regard. Sesame will be much, much better!

We have just implemented the export engine and I want you to be the first to see it. Q&A does its ASCII export through a series of menu choices and field selections. Sesame will also do that, but we have built the feature right into the main database view! As Figure 1 shows, you can see all the exportable fields in the lower left hand corner of the screen. This includes not only the fields in the main form, but also the sub-form fields (if any).

Figure 1. Exportable fields shown in the lower left hand corner of screen.

By simply clicking on the fields to export, you can set the order of the fields to include in the export file as well as specify, for each selected field, a "padded" fixed length (which is very useful for number fields that need to be front-filled with zeros), or a truncated length (where you only want to export a specific number of characters from a lenthy text field). See Figure 2.

Figure 2. Selecting fields to export.

Note that you can select not only fields in the primary record, but also those in the sub-records. We have decided to treat each combination of primary record/sub-record as a single record for export. In other words, if you are exporting an invoice with line-item sub-records, Sesame will generate a separate record or line in the export file for each line-item in the record. The result will be a separate data line containing both the information from the main form plus the applicable information from each line-item.

Once you have determined what you want to export, Sesame then gives you options that many Q&A users have always wanted. See Figure 3. You can select any field separator you want (a comma -- the usual -- or tab, custom, or none). As for the field delimiter, such as quotes around the values, you can tell Sesame to delimit only the text fields or to place the delimiters around all exported values, including numbers and dates. This option will come in very handy for export to financial and mailing software packages. You can select double quotes ("), single quotes (') or even a custom delimiter to place around the fields. (Something Q&A can't do.) And most importantly -- and something else Q&A can't do -- you can add a set of field names to the top of the record (sometimes called a header line) so that the receiver or receiving program knows just what data is in the file and how the field names are linked to it.

Figure 3. Sesame supports an impressive array of ASCII export options.

The final export file will include all the records you last retrieved and in the same sorted order as you specified in that retrieve. Figure 4 is an actual export file and shows the way Sesame handles sub-records. Note in the header that the fields from the sub-records (Gems) are listed with a "!" character to differentiate them from the main form records.

Figure 4. A Sesame export file.