openedge - How to customise table content dump in Progress-4GL database administration

Question

I'm working with Progress-4GL, and in there I'm dealing with quite a large table (+130 field, +8000 tuples).

In order to view that table, I've decided to dump the entries of that table and import this to Excel. This seems quite easy: just use "Data Administration", menu "Admin", menu item "Dump data and definition", "Table contents" (file extension: *.d).

But there's a catch: in the resulting *.d file, the fields are separated using a space, but there are some spaces in some fields, making the result "unimportable" in Excel. Therefore I'd like to separate the fields by a character which is certainly not used in that table (the pipe character ("|") is perfect for that.

Does anybody know how I can tell my general framework (OpenEdge Desktop, release 11.6, not any "Studio" IDE) to use another character as a separator in the *.d table contents dump?

Most probably this is to be done, using an entry in the Progress.ini file (as the answer of this question), but I don't know which entry I'm dealing with.

It would also be nice to have the column headers in that *.d table contents dump, is that even possible?

Edit
Meanwhile I've found out that some of the character fields contain newlines, causing the table content dump to be distributed over different lines. This, of course, makes the whole thing unusable. Is there any way not to go to a new line in the *.d file?

Thanks in advance

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65901655/how-to-customise-table-content-dump-in-progress-4gl-database-administration

Answer 1

Check Admin->Export Data->Text menu item in Data Administration tool. You can select "All" for "Fields to Export" option. The "Field Delimiter" can be left empty and choose "|" as "Field Separator" (or any character of your choice). The only thing where this might fail is when a field's value is distributed over different lines.

Also, there is a KB article about this. It might help: http://knowledgebase.progress.com/articles/Article/P8426