Importing Galleries



AutoGallery SQL - Importing
Galleries











Quick Overview
This feature of the software will allow you to
import galleries from a text file. The text file containing your galleries
will need to be properly setup in order to import galleries from it, and
this document will explain all of the necessary steps.







File Format
The
gallery importer can read galleries only from standard text files. The
text file should have one gallery per line, and each line should contain a
delimited string with all of the information for one gallery. An example import
file is available for you to view, and your files should have a
similar format. In the example file, each value is delimited by a
| character. We recommend using that character, as it is not often found
in everyday use. You can, however, use any character you want to delimit
the fields in each line. Just make sure that the character you choose
appears only as a delimiter - if it appears elsewhere in the string the
software will not be able to tell the difference. We will be using
the first line of the sample file as an example: 15|[e-mail]|Amateur|http://www14.smutserver.com/teen/eryg/0823/24hztetlme.html|Young
amateur! If you separate this string into pieces based on
the | character, you will find that there are 5 bits of data:
[e-mail]://www14.smutserver.com/teen/eryg/0823/24hztetlme.htmlYoung
amateur! Each of the pieces represents one bit of
information about the gallery. Your file can have these pieces in any
order, they do not need to be in the same order as the sample file.
However, each line of the file must have the pieces in the same order.
Once you have a file that is properly formatted, you can continue on to
the next section for details on using the gallery importer.







Using the Importer
To
begin with, you will need to upload your text file. Make sure you upload
in ASCII mode, and place the file in the data directory of your
AutoGallery SQL installation. In the administrative interface
select the Import Galleries function from the first drop down menu. This
will bring you to a page where you can enter the name of your text file
and the delimiting character. Enter the name of the file you just
uploaded, and the character used to delimit the fields. Once you have done
that you can press the analyze file button. The software will pull
the first line from the file to see what data it can find. It will
separate out the data based on the delimiting character you provided, and
then display a page with the data it has found. On this page, you will
need to identify what each field's type is. From the drop
down menus you will need to select the type of each field. If there is a
field in your file that does not match up with any of the allowed types,
select the IGNORE option and the software will ignore that field. Once you
have selected the type for each field, you will need to decide whether you
want these galleries to go in the queue or current database. Select the
option you want, and then press the import galleries button. Once
completed, you will be returned to the main administrative page, and a
count of the number of imported galleries will be listed at the top of the
page. We recommend that you limit your imports to 1000 galleries per file.
Many servers place a time limit on the execution time of CGI scripts, and
trying to import too many galleries may result in a timeout in the middle
of the process.







Field Type Notes
The
only two field types you need to worry about format with is the Submit
Date and Approve Date. If you have these two types in your gallery import
file, they must be in YYYY-MM-DD format. If a Submit Date and Approve Date
are not provided, the software will use the current date when importing.