Merchant Archive

All,

Does anyone have a useful tool for parsing vendor/bazaar sales yet? I would like to get at this information and keep track, but this is not in my skill set. If so, would you mind sharing?

Right now it is still pencil and paper for me!

Thanks!

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tuta23 wrote:

All,

Does anyone have a useful tool for parsing vendor/bazaar sales yet? I would like to get at this information and keep track, but this is not in my skill set. If so, would you mind sharing?

Right now it is still pencil and paper for me!

Thanks!

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I'm playing with a little something but it isn't ready for prime time quite yet.

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DocSavag wrote:
I'm playing with a little something but it isn't ready for prime time quite yet.

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I've only given the files a cursory look and have not started anything yet.Have you reverse engineered the date field yet?

If so, please post here how to decode the date/time information.

Thanks.

I wrote mine inVB because I can quickly develop the code and test it. I'm not opposed to helping with a larger project but I don't have any interest in writing anything complex. I mainly just wanted an import routine to import into an ODBC database (in this case I am currently using Access but it could be easily converted to just about anything that windows can handle as an odbc connection string.)

A great solution would be a web-based app that everyone can access. The user would upload a zip file containing all of the /mailsave files they want to parse. Press the "GO" button and get a *.csv/*.txt file mailed to you (or sent to the user somehow). Whatever the parser is coded in wouldn't matter.

I have the code complete, the server, I just need the bandwidth, let me check my limitations.

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DocSavag wrote:

[regarding a /mailsave tool] I'm playing with a little something but it isn't ready for prime time quite yet.

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Cool! I had been thinking about doing that too, but it has been suffering fromfeature creep in my mind and the project has been growing out of bounds before I wrote any code. Some of the features that I felt I needed to build were:

* Decent mail client display to screen with folder capabilities.

* Compressed storage into a single file (or even a zip file)

* Export of buy and sell messages into a cdf for spreadsheet processing.

* Selection of files to export

* Prevent duplicates in compressed form even if same mail saved more than once

As a result my estimated coding time has grown outside my likely time to complete anything in a reasonable timeframe.

Any interest in making it an open-source project that I could contribute to? I prefer Visual C++ development for this application, but could handle anything with a reasonably priced development environment.

I have something that I've been using, works great, seperates between vendor and bazaar sales and regular "hey, what's up?" emails. It even parses out the left over color tags that some items are named with. But I will need to add a few things before distributing it. It is written in perl.

Oh, btw, it creates one flat delimited file that can be loaded into a database (Access, Oracle, MySQL, etc.) or with Excel. Customer name, City, Planet, Item, Quantity, Price, Data, Time are all seperated out.

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Ewach wrote:

I've only given the files a cursory look and have not started anything yet.Have you reverse engineered the date field yet?

If so, please post here how to decode the date/time information.

Thanks.

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Q. How do I view the contents of a TIMESTAMP fieldcreated by anSQL Server?

A. You don't. Timestamp columns, contrary to what the name implies, are NOT date/times. They are just hex values which are guaranteed by SQL Server to be unique within the database. In normal circumstances the values are monotonically increasing.

Goff McMerrii
Miner

Ignore above post by me. That was directly taken from the SQL manual. "Usually" timestamps have nothing to do with time, nor dates. In this case however, the timestamp is not a unique identifier but rather a date/time. In the mail-file format the ID is actually the Timestamp (when following the correct terminology) and what is called Timestamp is actually date/time.

To convert it to a readable date/time us the following function (for ASP, should be valid for VBScript aswell):

FormatDateTime(value+2209161600)/60/60/24,2)

Where value is the date/time value.

Goff McMerrii
Miner