There is a continual, if low level, interest in importing and exporting information between HP appointment, phone book and general database files on the one hand and non-HP software applications on the other.

When a reader requests information, he/she is usually referred to a program called DBUtil or advised to use the built-in SmartClip. 

I have remained frustrated with these options, but need to transfer some of this information between my HP databases and a personal information called Commence. My success has been mixed and the following information is provided to guide others who have similar data translation needs. I hope this will open additional discussion and suggestions that will be useful to me.

The program dbutil.zip on the HPHand forum unzips into a file called GDBDump.exe and one called GDBLoad.exe plus documentation files. The dump file translates a notebook. phone book or general database file into a comma delimited ascii format.

Hewlett Packard's connectivity pack 2.0 translates the above files plus appointment book files into comma delimited ascii format. 

HP's built-in SmartClip can be used to create comma delimited ascii files by enclosing each field in its own pair of double-quote marks and separating each field with commas.

A third-party product called Intellilink is not further covered because it doesn't deal with general database or note pad files.

TEST DATABASE

In order to evaluate the manner in which each of these utilities translates data, I created a database named test.gdb with the following fields:

Name, 
Date, 
Time 
Choice (Options box: Important/Urgent),
Check (Check box one/two),
Category (Cat 1, Cat 2 Cat 3)

The translation of this file by the HP connectivity pack, GDBDump and SmartClip are listed below. 

HP Connectivity Pack

"1 first","12/25/1994","12:01 am","Important",1,0,"Cat 1"
"2 second","1/01/1995","12:01 am","Important",0,1,"Cat 2"
"3 third","2/03/1995","12:01 am","Urgent",1,1,"Cat 3"

GDBDump from DBUtil.Zip

"Name","Date","Time","Important","Urgent","one","two","Category"
"1 first",19941225,0001,1,0,1,0,"Cat 1"
"2 second",19950101,0001,1,0,0,0,"Cat 2"
"3 third",19950203,0001,0,1,1,0,"Cat 3"


Example of SmartClip output

"1 first","Important","",""[X] one","[ ] two","12/25/94","12:01 am","Cat 1"
"2 second","Important","",""[ ] one","[X] two","01/01/95","12:01 am","Cat 2"
"3 third","","Urgent",""[X] one","[X] two","02/03/95","12:01 am","Cat 3"

In each case, the name field which is a text field was translated in a consistent fashion. 

Dates and times were translated as you would write them "mm/dd/yyyy", "hh:mm" by the connectivity pack and smart clip, but as a numerical entry with the form yyyymmdd by GDBDump.

Option box groups were treated as a single item by the connectivity pack which translated the text of the choice to the output file. GDBDump translated each option button separately as a 0 or 1 for unchecked or checked. SmartClip treated each option button as a separate entry and printed the text of the selected option and empty quotes "" for each unselected option.

Check box groups were treated as separate items by each of these utilities. Connectivity pack and GDBDump supplied 0 or 1 to indicate unchecked or checked. Smart clip printed a literal "picture" of each selection-- "[X] one" if the box was selected and "[ ] one" if unselected.

There is clearly considerable inconsistency in the manner that each of these utilities translates different types of information. Commence can import date and time in an "English" format, but not yyyymmdd format. I know of no commercial product that can deal with a check mark notation of "[X] one", except as literal text.

I had just about decided that the HP Connectivity pack would solve my problems, when I discovered that the output of a date field from an appointment database was handled differently than a date field from a database file.

HP CP output from an Appointment book file is illustrated below:

"19940712","0700","0900","0","0655","Teaching with KU",,,"19940712","1","1"
"19940712","1230","1330","0","1225","CCU MTG SJMC",,"CR-B","19940712","1","1"

Rather than having the "mm/dd/yy" format of dates in the database translator, the appointment book application produces dates in a numerical yyyymmdd format. This obviously creates problems for transferring date information between applications unless you wish to do additional programming.

ADBIO

A recent addition to the HPHand library, ADBIO.zip, permits a fairly flexible export of information from appointment databases. The unzipped file contains adbdump and adbload plus documentation. Adbdump translates appointment files into comma separated values with control over output format. Date format, for instance, can be very finely tuned. Time is output "hh:mm" and is limited to 24 hour format, which some software cannot use. Note fields are accommodated with a limit of about 8,000 characters and total appointment book size is limited to about 40,000 bytes.

ANOTHER HP CONNECTIVITY PACK INCONSISTENCY

PHONE BOOK export/import is interesting because the field structure of the exported file differs from that of the built-in phone book database. The built-in database has a single name field. When the HP connectivity pack is finished processing, the name has been parsed into first, last and middle. There is no way to return this to the original format and bring it back into the phone book application without additional processing with other software.

You can, however, fool the connectivity pack by selecting the translate DATABASE function and adding a PDB extension for the source file specification. In this manner, the name field of the phone book application remains intact. I have not tried fooling the connectivity pack with phone book import and do not know if it would work in reverse.

NOTE FIELDS WITH IMBEDDED CARRIAGE RETURNS

If you are using note fields in the phone book, database note pad and address book applications to contain more than a few lines of text , you will want to break them into readable chunks by using your [ENTER] key to create paragraphs. If you do this, then wish to export the information to another application, you will have to do some additional processing.

The connectivity pack exports note fields that contain carriage returns with a tab character substitution. So if you want to use these files in another application, you need to use a word-processor to convert these to carriage return/linefeed pairs.

SmartClip simply adds its own carriage return/linefeed every 60 or so characters, creating a situation that is fairly difficult to correct even with a word processor.

GDBDump substitutes \r\n for imbedded carriage return/linefeeds and a word-processor is again required if you wish to retain the paragraph structure of the original file.

Using WinWord and the connectivity pack I have been able to solve my export needs for the phone book, database and notepad and my import needs for the notepad. If all you need to transfer is text, categories numbers and notes, then the connectivity pack or GDBDump plus a word processor should work just fine. If you do not need note fields with imbedded carriage returns, then SmartClip is the easiest way to export ascii delimited text.

The need for transferring check box information pretty much excludes SmartClip as a useful tool.

If you need "/" delimited dates from your appointment book, then you are probably best off with SmartClip or ADBIO. If you need am/pm time format in addition to "/" date delimiters, you are mostly out of luck except for exporting with SmartClip. Microsoft Access and Excel allow you to specify the format of date imports and you should be able to manipulate the information for transfer to another piece of software, if desired. If your note fields are less than about 512 characters, Excel might work fine. 

If you can live with shorter note fields, you could process most of these delimited files using the built-in 123 spreadsheet and calculating date and time values for output to another program. This, however, requires a moderate degree of sophistication in the use of 123 functions.

