Re: IBIDEM CONVERSION QUERY, 4.5 TO 5.2

[Rick Penticoff <rpenticoff@nospam.moscow.com>]

On 01:31 PM 12/11/00, Russ Spittler wrote:

>No, the two versions aren't on the same machine.  When I got a new laptop, I
>installed NBWin 5.2 (including the update)Lingua Work Station..  Over 
>there now
>sits the old machine with NBDos 4.5.  My challenge is to get the former 
>Ibidem,
>specially (or even only) my added titles, on to the new machine and in the new
>Ibidem.           Could I some way copy only the titles I myself added to the
>sample Ibidem database?  Would these be #2950 onward, regardless of
>alphabetization?  Could/should I copy them only and then add them into 5.2 
>on the
>new machine?  I will have no further use for NBDos 4.5 and its components, 
>and I
>will shortly delete all from the old machine.

Russ,

I tried several methods of getting "free-standing" DOS-Ibid records into a 
Win-Ibidem database.  Here's what I learned:

1) I tried appending my DOS-Ibid records as Win-Ibidem records.  I first 
created a new database in Win-Ibidem.  I then tried the appending process: 
File | Append Records | Ibidem Records ==> Close Database?  Yes ==> Chose 
"Destination Database" from dropdown list, then browsed to the directory 
where my DOS-Ibid .dat records were and clicked "Okay."  I got an error 
message and no records were appended.  This makes sense since the importer 
was expecting the records to be in Win-Ibidem format already.

2) I then tried appending my DOS-Ibid records as "Custom Format" 
records.  This also didn't work because the Win-Ibidem importer expects the 
DOS-Ibidem database file (or any other "custom" file) to follow a certain 
strict format: A) there must be no record #s (the importer adds them); B) 
every record in the DOS-Ibid database must contain ALL the fields used by 
the Win-Ibidem importer (and even if the fields have no data, they must 
have a placeholder in the DOS database); C) all fields in all records must 
be in exactly the same order.  There's probably no native DOS-Ibid database 
that meets these conditions because Ibid creates fields in a record only 
when there is data in them.  And book records don't contain fields needed 
by journal entries and vice versa.  Getting a DOS-Ibid database into the 
format required by the importer would require quite a bit of work.

So, by far the easiest thing for you to do would be to install NB-Win on 
your old computer, perform your Ibidem conversion there, then look in the 
Win-Ibidem Help for the topic, "Manually Backing up an Ibidem Database" for 
suggestions on how you can copy the results over to your new 
computer.  Once you've done this, you can uninstall Win-Ibidem on the old 
computer.

Rick