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Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:04:45 -0500
From: Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>
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Subject: Re: Filemaker to CouchDB
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Probably a little more complicated than that.

Filemaker is interesting in that, unlike SQL, it allows for repeating 
fields - so you have to worry about more than exporting tables, you have 
to worry about records that have some structure.

While it provides for export to a lot of formats, including CSV and 
Excel, if your database includes repeating fields, you need to figure 
out how to export into something that lets you maintain the structure of 
complicated records. You could, for example:
- export to a format that does support repeating fields (Filemaker seems 
to support export of repeating fields to XML), then do something to 
convert to json for use w/Couch
- Filemaker will expose data via a web service - so you could write 
something that sucks data out of Filemaker then puts it into Couch

There does seem to be a lot of information available if you Google 
Filemaker, export, "repeating fields," JSON, XML, and so forth.

Filemaker also is sort of a programming environment - people write 
fairly fancy applications that can go well beyond what people do with 
Excel macros.  If you also want to export those, you're on your own.  
(Not that long ago I was faced with an application written in an 
obsolete version of Filemaker, old enough that it will no longer run on 
newer versions of Mac OS.  Converting to something else was a right 
royal pain.)

Miles Fidelman

Mark Hahn wrote:
> CSV?
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Stephan Bardubitzki <
> stephan@bardubitzki.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't even exactly know what Filemaker (seems to be not SQL based) is
>> about, however, it is heavily used in some government departments.
>>
>> So, I just through out this question in case someone has done that before:
>>
>> Is there any feasible procedure to convert/transfer data from Filemaker to
>> CouchDB?
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
>> Stephan
>>
>>
>>
>>


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra