>Looking for a suggestion.
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>I have a vpf9.exe with 8 tables, linked with pk and fk's (3rd normal form). All works fine. Most of the data is name and address, emails addresses and phone numbers. It is obvious the users want to export these name to other sources. In addition, they also want to be able to import names from other sources (Outlook and Outlook express and probably others, too).
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>The question.
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>Export: Is this a denormalization of the tables?
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>Import: How do you find out how to process OutLook / Express tables?
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>Dallas
Export: Yes you denormalize (if target is not one that could handle normalized data - otherwise redundancy is not required nor suggested. ie: XML).
Select what you'd show on a report or what they would like to see into a cursor and copy that out in whatever format it's needed. Or create such a view in your database and they could import instead using ADO, ADO.Net (view would allow them to see the data in denormalized form and they don't need to discover keys/relations either manually or in code - otherwise remember no need to create redundancy).
Import: For outlook you could use automation. Outlook express doesn't support automation. However for both there is an option to output to text files (CSV) in their menus. Users might export from them on their own and you instead support mapping and importing from text files.
Cetin