sorting numbers entered as string data

12 posts by 4 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: July 28, 2008   (RSS)

By rcrofoot - July 27, 2008

Hi Dave-

I've run into a snag...not with CMS...but with a 3rd party company currently used by real estate companies, and I was hoping to get your opinion...

It's simply this: If I am supplied a .txt notepad file containing 2 lines of tab delimited fieldnames, followed by many lines of tab delimited listing data, is it possible to create a MySql table based on the fieldnames given, but not being supplied data types or varchar/char field lengths??? I don't think there is and have experimented with variations of CREATE TABLE but with no success...

This has been extremely frustration. This company supplies a technical pdf, but nowhere is there mentioned data type/fieldlength values...but they do mention that 3 tables have to be built an their relation to each other...Am I not as proficient in SQL as I thought, or is being supplied field names only and data not enough to create a table and use LOAD DATA INFILE to populate it???

Just a "you're not as good as you thought" or "they're not giving you enough data" type of response would be of great help to me...

By the way...CMS is working flawlessly on 2 ouf our sites!...

Thanks, Rick

Re: [rcrofoot] sorting numbers entered as string data

By Dave - July 28, 2008

Hi Rick,

The default field types we use for CMS Builder are quite large and will likely accommodate your data.

One way to manipulate various import files is to import them into excel and then export them as something easier to work with (sometimes that's CSV).

If you need to merge 3 tables, though, you'll likely need some custom programming for that. We do lots of custom import/export scripts for CMS Builder and I'd be happy to take a look at your sample import data and let you know what would be involved.

If you want to talk about that feel free to drop me an email at dave@interactivetools.com.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com