EasyPopulate 4.0 Support Thread

[mc12345678]

Okay, I need help with two issues I am experiencing. One is easier to explain and the other I will explain and if you need more clarification to make sense of it please ask questions.

1. The first issue is with upc field. We have some products with upc code starting with zeros. Something like, 000768251143. When I generate an export file. The csv file that is generated drops the leading zeros in the upc column. 000768251143 becomes 768251143. Is there a way to protect this field during file generation to treat it as a text field so the numbers are not messed up? I did not have this issue with previous easy populate that uses text file instead of csv file. I will greatly appreciate any help in solving this issue as this is a show stopper.

2. The second problem is when I export a file, some of the description fields are empty even though they have content. There's nothing unique about the products that are missing descriptions so I am not sure how tell you how to duplicate this problem. However, it seems that the seem products that are dropping description fields on export remains the same (which makes me think there's something common between them even if I can see it).

I will appreciate any help to get to the bottom of these two issues.

Thanks!

Thank you so much for the clarification. As suggested, I tested the downloaded file in my text editor and everything looks as expected. This is good and it means there's no problem with Easy Populate with regards to the file that's generated. As you rightly suggested, I noticed that Open Office have a function to indicate the column type and once I changed it to text for the upc column everything worked as expected with the leading zeros preserved. This means that issue is resolved with regards to the leading zeros. Thank you so much for your time and troubleshooting with me.

With regards to the description field, I am going to play with it a bit and report back my findings. The strange thing is even though when I open the file in Open Office, some product description are missing in the field, if I close the file and open it in the text editor, the descriptions are there just not showing when I open it Open Office. Strange I know (unless there's a maximum length for a cell in Open Office). I will play around and see what I find out.

Thanks!

So for clarification, the remaining problem is that when opening your CSV with open office, the description field does not contain all the information that is expected, though it always had some amount of information when looking in OO. (Ie, no description fields that have information on ZC are totally blank in OO.) The next thing (which was under investigation) was to determine if the truncated fields are of a consistent length. I might suggest an equation applied to each row to gather the length of the cell(s) in question and then perform a max at the bottom of that column to determine if there is a max that means anything. In light of an unusual max like 3965 (not a multiple of 2^x or (2^x)-1) I would think that the issue is related to a character or sequence of characters that OO is acting on. If so (OO acting on) then would need to identify the offending character(s) using a standard text editor, change, delete, replace, the character(s) and then try to open the file in OO again.

With the above hopefully correctly summarized current condition, maybe someone else has some "words of wisdom". There maybe issues related with character conversion (ie was the current database updated to where it is now UTF-8 from a previous version, was something like Microsoft Access used at one point to populate the database, etc...) Your assistance would help identify how to proceed and what caused the problem you are experiencing.