Thanks Hector

I figured as much. I'll just write my own, again. It won't be bad. I've actually done it 3 times in VFP, and I've got the process down pretty well. It's just a tedious task!



>I've seen people address the problem using all sorts of things, from home brew solutions to third a party tools.
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>BizTalk is suppossed to have a nice tool to handle data mapping between different structures. MS always shows that when they demo BizTalk. However, from what I've seen, it is too much of a pain to setup/learn BizTalk just to do that (althought it can do much more than that but have yet to meet someone that actually uses it in real apps.)
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>SQL Server also provides some tools. You can write DTS packages to do the job and they are very easy to do for simple transformations (from a text file to a database) but as soon as you start adding variations you end up writting a lot of VB script code to do the translations and you might as well do your own home grow solution from scratch. The advantage of this DTS packages is that there are a lot of developers out there that can do (or help you do) this.
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>There is also home grow solutions. For the stuff I've dealt with this has been the approach that most people prefer.
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>There are some other third party tools (don't remember their names since I've never used them) that are specific for this problem. They can be very cool but also very expensive (which is why I've never used them<g>)
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>I guess the anwer is that there is no easy solution to a problem like this :)
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>>I have data in several different formats (i.e. Excel, CSV) and layouts, but containing similar fields (i.e. price, unitssold, discount, etc.). I need to import the data into a single table or XML file.
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>>Furthermore, I receive this data continuously, and the formats occassionally change, so I need the ability of the user to re-map the data.
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>>As an example, in one file (file "A"), the unitssold field is the first field, in another file (file "B"), the unitssold field is in the 3rd field. I need to import both of those files into the same table or XML file, where the unitssold is stored in the 5th field. This must happen repeatedly, so whatever tool I employ must remember the layout of file A and file B, and how to map it to my table.
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>>I wrote a data mapping tool in VFP, but it was a pain and I need a tool to do the same thing in .Net.
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>>Does anybody know of any existing tools? Does ADO.Net provide any kind of data mapping functions? What about SQL server? I couldn't find anything, but I'm easily overwhelmed by the quantity of articles.
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>>Thanks,
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>>David