transfering data

itworks

i have a client that want's me to develop a shopping cart site for him but he want's to be able to transfer the products on his software to the site database like 2/3 times a week.

how can the products be exported to MySQL? (i'm not sure but i think the software must be using MS SQL)

is this my responsability or the company who makes the software assistance to provide a way to export it to MySQL?

thanks in advance

sroughley

That could be a tricky one. Not too sure what you mean, but I imagine that you mean the data has to be moved from his software database to the website MySQL database. How is the data stored in/on the clients software? If it is stored in raw data format, then you could write a parse script to load it into MySQL. But if it is encrypted by his software then it will be necessary for his software to be able to output the data to some format that is either readable for parsing or is in a format that can be loaded by another database application that could output the data to a manageable format. Either way, if you are only the website administrator, then this is only half your problem; loading the data into the webiste database. The extraction of the data from the software is the software vendors responsibility. And should have been something that they considered during development.

Regards.

Steve.

greg252

Export from software as delimited text, write a parser to explode the text file when uploaded and insert into mySQL.

If the software doesn't export as delimited text...
I'll keep thinking about it.

itworks

thanks a lot to all of you, as usual this forum is like a life saver!

so if i understood well, as long as the data from the software isn't encrypted it isn't that hard to accomplish this, right?

i was wondering if anyone could explain the parse thing better, i haven't got a clue about it.

and if you have any more thoughts about it i really appretiate you could express them 'cause it would be great for me to be prepared when the time to develop the site for the client comes.

thanks in advance.