Output File Options Configuration

  1. Input CSV file path
    This is the absolute path of the csv (comma separated value) file that is to be converted to the format recognized by POD.  An example would be C:\temp\pod\mydb.csv for Win32, or /home/myname/pod/mydb.csv for Unix.  This is used when you have previously used another database program and you want to convert it to POD DB format. You first export your previous DB into csv format, and then specify the path of the exported file here. Please note that you need to run conversion.exe to convert the csv file. conversion.exe can be launched without a web server. Instruction for conversion.exe is below.
  2. Output format
    Here you specify the data in the csv files belong to which items of your new DB. For example, your csv file is composed of lines like "Bob,800-888-8888,Ph.D", then you might wish to put "name,telephone,status" here because these are the entry items names (assigned in Database Entry Info Configuration  option 1) those data should belong to.
  3. Separation character
    For csv files, it is comma ",". If your original DB file is separated by, say, "|", then put "|" here (without the quotation mark of course).

conversion.exe usage instruction
This feature is only supported in registered version of POD! conversion.exe is a standalone application that can be run independently under Win32/Unix OS, unlike POD (fldb.exe and fldbconf.exe) which must be accessed thru web server. Therefore you can use it on your local computer to convert your old DB file first, then upload those files to your web server. Please follow the step-by-step instructions below to convert a csv file to POD format:

  1. Configure your DB as you would normally do following instructions in all other configuration sections, after which you make a copy of your ini file and rename it as oldb.ini and put it under the same directory as conversion.exe.
  2. Put the path of your old database (in .csv format) into that oldb.ini file [conversion] section as described above. Double click conversion.exe file to execute it. conversion.exe will take the old DB file and covert it to the format recogized by POD. The new DB file is output to the same directory as conversion.exe with the name FLDB.txt. It is best to launch conversion.exe through MS DOS prompt on Win32 or shell on Unix/Linux, because you'll get to see any error mesg or instructions that way.

Please note: No sorting of the entries in the source file will be performed & time stamp will not be converted as POD does not try to guess which stamp format your old database was using. Different data types are not supported during conversion, which is usually not a problem as you normally could specify the type later (except for time stamp data type). conversion.exe simply copies the content of each item in your old DB into the items of your new POD-format DB.
The "source.txt" in the package is used to demonstrate what csv file looks like and how conversion.exe works. You may practice importing with the file as follows. First you have to configure your DB as described in Installation (most importantly, you should assign the names and sizes to the DB entry items). Then assign the appropriate item names to each of the 5 data items in source.txt that is separated by "," in output format in this section. These item names can be any item names you assigned in Database Entry Info Configuration (if some data in the .csv file should not be imported, you should put a * sign in its place. Do not leave its place empty ). Also remember to set path of source.txt in the path in Output File Options Configuration section. After that you can follow the instructions described above to launch converions.exe to convert the file.