Student import fails on French systems. - Requested item or ordinal not found.

Date: December 9, 2003

Version affected: v1.70, non-US systems

Symptoms:

The student import program (simport.exe) uses the Microsoft Text Driver to read data in from the input file. The input file is required to be in CSV (comma-separated-variable) format. Some programs used to create the input data file use the local system's "list separator" character instead of a comma when creating a CSV file. Microsoft Excel is an example of a program that behaves this way. Because the text driver expects a comma to delimit columns in the input file an error will occur on systems where the "list separator" is not a comma. For instance, French systems use a semicolon as a list separator. The usual error in this situation will be "Requested item or ordinal not found " although in some cases the student records may merely be rejected with an error indicating that there were missing required parameters.

Cause:

The Microsoft Text Driver expects a comma to delimit columns in a CSV file by default. The affected import files contain semicolons instead.

Correction:

The simport.exe program has been modified to:

• allow the user to specify the column delimiter on the "Files" tab. This value will be initialized to the current Windows user's "list separator" character from the system registry.
• create a text driver schema.ini file in the directory containing the import file. The schema.ini file will specify the CSV delimiter in use and the column names and data types.

As a side effect of the changes the program will no longer re-write the import file to specify the column headings.

This patch contains a updated versions of:

File
simport.exe
sourcecode (directory)	VB6 project files needed to build simport.exe