Re: [Cart-users] Trying to Get Started

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On May 12, 2005, at 5:28 PM, RETemp wrote:
> Our department receives monthly housing data from about 90 
> Associations of REALTORS (AORs) throughout California. We already have 
> a system that accepts Excel (.csv) files of MLS records as input. Each 
> record contains about 70 data fields such as property type, status of 
> listing, selling price, days on market, etc. Since many of the AORs 
> are in the process of installing RETS-compliant servers, we would like 
> to begin collecting our monthly data from them using a RETS client. 
> Does Cart sound like a good choice for this?

First off, sorry for the late reply.  I have been out of the office 
quite a bit in the last few weeks.

Cart is not actively supported by CRT anymore.  If it works in it's 
current form then, great.  But CRT is not doing any more work on it, 
including bug fixes and feature enhancements.  I would not recommend it 
for any new applications.

You may want to look at ezRETS, our RETS ODBC driver:

   http://www.crt.realtors.org/projects/rets/ezrets/

It is still in the early stages of development, but we hope to have 
something usable for non-programmers relatively soon.  But you will 
still have to be fairly technically include to use ODBC.  If you have 
access to programmers, you could use our Java or C++ RETS library to 
write a custom application:

   C++ library (librets):
   http://www.crt.realtors.org/projects/rets/librets/

   Java RETS client:
   http://cart.sourceforge.net/documentation/rets-client/

librets has not had an official release, yet, but again, we hope to 
have one soon.  The Java RETS client is used by third party RETS 
developers.

> I have downloaded, installed, and launched Cart on my computer, and 
> one question already confronts me. Before giving me permission to 
> access its server (a Rapattoni MLS), the people who run the server 
> want me to tell them the value for "User-Agent" that my client is 
> sending. What should I tell them?

The user agent should be "Cart/1.0beta2"

-Dave