Overview

Option menu items can be imported into Tracker from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft Access database. For example, you may have a large number of option menu items that are listed in a legacy database. You can import those items into Tracker to avoid having to manually create each item. Items can be imported into any pulldown field except those configured as a user pulldown.

Preparing to Import Data

The following items will guide you through preparing for the data import:

Configure the Workgroup
Before starting the import process, Tracker must be configured with the necessary pulldown fields that you wish to use.

Prepare the Data File
Data can be imported from Access or Excel. The data file is the Access table or Excel sheet that holds the pulldown items to be imported. In the Item data file, the first row should be a header row to identify the name of each column in the data. All other rows are the actual data to be imported as shown in the example below. You do not have to use the column names as listed below as you will be able to map each column to a property during the pulldown import process. Only a column with the item labels is required (the "Label" column in the example below). However, you can include additional columns if you wish to specify any of the following properties for each item:

Order - The order in which the item is displayed in the pulldown field relative to the other items. Any non-negative integer can be specified. When multiple items share the same order, the items are sorted alphabetically.

Value is Public - This property determines whether an item is displayed in the pulldown field when the field is displayed on the Submit Page or the Knowledge Base. If you wish to "hide" certain items from being displayed on these pages which are available to unregistered users, enter "No" as the value for this property. Otherwise, enter "Yes".

Obsolete - This property determines whether an item is available for selection on the Add, Edit and Task pages. Marking an item as obsolete indicates that it should not be selected for any new records and should not be available for selection when updating existing records, but records that already have the item selected should remain unchanged. If you wish to mark an item as obsolete, enter "Yes" for this property. Otherwise, enter "No". If an existing item is updated via the import tool to mark it as obsolete (value = "Yes"), any existing pulldown dependencies that involve the item will be removed.

Label Order Public Obsolete Product A 1 Yes No Product B 2 Yes No Other 99 Yes No

Use the Import Standards section to make sure the items data is valid and is displayed in the right formats. This step is crucial as it will minimize the effort involved in running the import. If the data is not valid, the import will fail and you will have to correct the data and perhaps restart the import tool more than once each time invalid data is found.

The Create Pulldown Items privilege is available for the Import feature and is disabled by default. It can be enabled for the Admins user group. This privilege allows option menu items to be imported from a data file. When this privilege is enabled, an "Import" link will be available in the Manage Menu Items page for each pulldown field.

To enable this privilege:

1. Login to the workgroup as Admin
2. Click on the Admin icon
3. Click on the User Accounts link
4. Click on the Manage Groups button
5. Click on the Edit button to the left of the Admins user group
6. Check the box for the Create Pulldown Items privilege, then click OK to save.
7. A user will have to logoff and log back in for the change to take effect

Each workgroup has an "Import" folder at:

installDir\workgroup\Import

where installDir is the directory where Tracker was installed (by default, C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\NetResultsTracker\).

When a user logs in and attempts to import data, a user-specific folder is created in the Import folder. For the Admin user, this folder is called "Admin". For all other users, the folder is labeled with a number. Under the user-specific folders are these folders:

Data
This folder contains the data files that are selected during each import attempt. A sub-folder called "PldnItems" is where the data files for pulldown items are copied when selected during the import process.

Logs
This folder contains the log files for each import attempt. Log files can be viewed from within Tracker using the steps in the Logs section.

A sub-folder called "PldnItems" is where the log files for pulldown items are saved during the import process. The file called "ptitemimportlatestlog.txt" is the log file that contains the information for the latest import attempt and "ptitemimportlog.txt" is the full log.

The full details of each import attempt are logged.

To view a log file from a Pulldown Item Import:

1. Login to the workgroup as Admin
2. Click on the Admin icon
3. Click on the Fields link
4. Click on the Items button to the left of the desired field
5. Click on the Import link in the upper right corner
6. Select the option View Log File
7. In the pulldown, select whether you wish to view the "Latest Log", which will show only the information for the last pulldown item import attempt, or "Full Log", which will show the entire log for all pulldown item import attempts
8. Click Back to return to the Import Pulldown Items menu