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From now until January 6th, 2012 the names of all those who complete the quiz will be entered in a draw to win a $50 Chapters gift card (or gift card from an equivalent online book store).  We will be contacting the winner by email so you must enter your name and a valid email address to win. Contest closes at at 5:00 pm Pacific Time on January 6th, 2012.

Visit www.andornot.com/quiz for your chance to win!

The quiz asks you very specific questions about using DB/TextWorks, with answers provided after each, along with some usage tips.  You can also review the correct answers when you complete the quiz. 

Feedback so far has been very positive:

  • “I enjoyed it very much!!! A good refresher and you should do it more often!”
  • “It was fun and nicely designed.  I would like to see more in the future.”
  • “Tricky, but good”

We plan to offer more quizzes next year on different topics.  We’ll also incorporate some of the findings into blog posts or newsletter articles as we’ve already noticed that many people get one particular question about date searching wrong. 

Please also check out our DB/TextWorks training schedule or contact us for an upgrade quote if you discover that your version does not have all the features covered in the quiz.

New Westminster is the oldest city in Western Canada with a long and rich history.   Andornot has been working with the City Archives for several years and is delighted that a search interface to selected archival records and photos is now available at http://archives.newwestcity.ca.  “This will be the first time in our city’s history that people with access to the Internet will be able to view our excellent photograph collection from either the comfort of their homes or any other location in the world,” says archivist Barry Dykes.  Read the complete press release here. Archives search results screenshot

Behind the scenes the Archives uses Inmagic DB/Text for SQL software plus a version of the Andornot Archives Starter Kit to manage their archival descriptions.  A subset of records in the database is then transferred to the public facing website outside the firewall.  

“We enjoyed working with Andornot and are very pleased with the search interface they developed for us.  The advice and suggestions we received along the way were essential to the completion of this project. For instance, they encouraged us to incorporate some of the latest social bookmaking tools. “  [Barry Dykes]

Please contact us for more information.

If you are using Content Server (now known as "DB/Text for SQL"), it goes without saying that you should have regular automatic backups in place: regularly verified and regularly "test" restored. You DO have such a plan in place, right? Right?!?

Dilbert.com

For backing up DB/Text for SQL, it's a touch more involved than a typical SQL Server backup, simply because there's data both in and out of SQL Server and both need to be backed up at the same time. Moreover, SQL Server databases are not able to be backed up by typical backup mechanisms (to oversimplify, the actual files are always locked).

Fortunately, a manual backup of CS is pretty easy: just open up your CS Admin and follow the prompts to back up everything in one fell swoop into one handy .dat backup file. The bad news with that however, is that manual backups are a half-baked solution; backups need to be automated or they just won't get done often enough (if at all).

Options for automated CS backups:

  1. Back up the SQL Server aspects of CS as part of your regular automated SQL Server backups. And ensure that the external files are backed up at the same time. This solution will likely require the involvement of your IT staff. Moreover, automated SQL Server backups require SQL Server Agent which is not included with SQL Server Express (a requirement at least for a backup process that isn't the digital equivalent of the hokey-pokey dance crossed with a waltz). See your Administrator's Guide for details (for backup instructions, not dance tips).
  2. Use the built-in CS Admin backup capabilities, but automate them by plunking some CS-specific backup scripts in a batch file and scheduling them with Windows Task Scheduler.

Aha, you SQL-Server-Express-loving-person! Option two sounds great! Let's do it! Not so fast...have you seen those scripts? If you've got any more than one or two textbases, you'll go blind trying to accurately create and maintain those batch files. And that's where our new handy-dandy CS Backup Script Generator comes in. With it, you can quickly and easily generate accurate backup scripts contained in an automatically generated batch file that can be automatically run with a scheduled task. Did I mention automatically!?

Backups + Automation = Sweetness.

CS Backup Script Generator

 

  1. Download the Andornot CS Backup Script Generator here (yes, it's priceless so it's free) and install. Note that you can install the utility on any Windows machine as it does not need to be on your CS server.
  2. If you don't already have the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 installed, download it here and then install.
  3. Run the utility (should be in your start menu with a link on your desktop) and fill in three fields:
    1. SQL Server Instance: the name of your SQL Server instance, such as MachineName\SQLEXPRESS (if you don't know it, you can find it easily in your CS Admin).
    2. Backup directory: where you wish to have all backup files saved to (such as "D:\Backups\").
    3. Textbase Information Text: the text from the "List Textbases" summary within CS Admin (just select all the text in the summary, making sure to include the entire textbase listing such as the following:

      ...
      Textbase: D:\data\Barcodes
        SQL Database: '_InmTB_18'
      Textbase: D:\data\Borrower
        SQL Database: '_InmTB_19'
      Textbase: D:\data\Catalog
        SQL Database: '_InmTB_20'
      Textbase: D:\data\Contacts
        SQL Database: '_InmTB_21'
      Textbase: D:\data\Loans
        SQL Database: '_InmTB_22'
      ...

      The utility is smart enough to pick up the list of textbases from all the text in the summary, so you can paste in as much or as little of the summary as you like, as long as it includes the textbase listing. Get to the listing in CS Admin via the "Manage Textbases" > "List Textbases" menu item.
    4. Hit "Preview" to take a look at your new masterpiece (and shudder to think of doing that manually especially if you've got 10+ textbases) and/or "Batch it!" to save a .bat file to the location and name of your choosing.

      CS Backup Script Generator Preview
    5. Test the generated batch file by double-clicking it. After a few minutes (or less depending on the size of your database), there should now be a  .log and .dat file for each of your textbases in your specified backup directory.
    6. Review the .log file for any errors or warnings.
    7. Schedule the batch file to run daily during an off-peak time.
    8. Regularly review the generated log files for any errors or warnings and verify that backups are taking place as required.
    9. Ensure that your backup directory itself is backed up off-server and off-site for disaster recovery. The generated .dat files can be simply x-copied (copied and pasted) to another location, or better yet, automatically backed up with your server's backup software as part of your server's regular backup routine.
    10. Every so often, test out restoring your .dat backups via the CS Admin.

Remember, "hell hath no fury like data scorned." Please love your data and back it up.

Disclaimer: this backup utility is very much "beta" quality. I'm not responsible for anything it may or may not do to your system (bad or otherwise). Use at your own risk. Having said that, the setup program simply places the .exe with some support DLLs on your system, and when the utility is run, you can easily review the batch files it generates before running them (which you could generate manually yourself if you prefer).

Whether you are using Inmagic CS/TextWorks (v.9 or less) or Inmagic DB/TextWorks (v.10 or less) on Vista, you will see something like the following error message when you try to use Help.

Why is that? Well, it's a long story* but the gist of it is, the help file was created in a format that is not, by default, supported by Windows Vista.

Fortunately, you *can* go and download the software which will let Vista use these older-style help files. (Anything that has the *.hlp filename extension.)

Get WinHlp32.exe for Windows Vista: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=82148.

* Okay, fine, here's the long story (taken verbatim from Microsoft site): "Windows Help (WinHlp32.exe) is a Help program that has been included with Microsoft Windows versions starting with the Microsoft Windows 3.1 operating system. However, the Windows Help program has not had a major update for many releases and no longer meets Microsoft's standards. Therefore, starting with the release of Windows Vista, the Windows Help program will not ship as a feature of Windows."

How Microsoft can get away with the cussed irony of condemning their own software for not meeting their standards is beyond me.

Lord knows why you'd want to do this, but it is possible. I have to do it to support as many client configurations as possible, but that's *my* nightmare.

I had CS 1.3 installed on the ICS_MSDE instance, just like the install directions told me to. Everything was default, so nothing strange about it.

I wanted to install CS 9 on SQL Server 2005 Express, though, not MSDE. I think that's the recommendation from Inmagic anyway. However, I wanted to keep CS 1.3 going on its original instance and not upgrade it.

All I had to do was install CS 9 in a different directory. So instead of letting it upgrade my CS 1.3 install at \Inmagic\Content Server, I forced it to install at \Inmagic\ContentServer9. I've done this before with DB/Text, and since this portion of the install has nothing to do with the database back-end, I figured I could get away with it for CS, and I was right.

When the time came to tell the CS 9 Admin tool what SQL instance to use, I pointed it at my SQL Express instance (I had previously installed SQL Express months ago). Hey presto. Actually, it wasn't immediate presto, because I had SQL Express configured to use Windows Authentication only and CS Workgroup needs it to use mixed mode (both Windows and SQL Authentication). Once I figured that out, though, truly presto was my name-o.

Now I have CS 1.3 running on MSDE and CS 9 running on SQL Express on my Win XP workstation. Some days after work I make them do little drag races. They also scrap with each other when I drop them into a bell jar.

 

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