Creating/Editing Custom Form Elements in Mas

[Anonymous]

Here is a question that may spawn a useful tip...

I would like to create/edit a number of custom form elmentsfields using Excel and import the results as a csv file to the appropriate tables (formelements table and adjust the formelements seq table accordingly as well ensuring IDs stay unique, etc).  However, when I do create a new field directly editing the formelements table, the changes don't seem to take effect on the front end.  Exactly what other table(s) do I also need to modify to see the results I am looking for? 

Because of the large number of custom fields largely shared by several distict listing classes that I need to create for a client, it would be far easier for me to do this type of copy and pasting in mas in Excel and then upload the results to the appropriate tables.  Show me the error of my ways!  Thanks!

[Tracy Ligon]

I know this isn't a complete answer but did you assign the elements you imported to a class? (class_id) and did you set (displaly_on_browse) to 1. 

I tried this sometime ago and dont remember exactly what I found but I then went backwards and created a few within the program and exported them as a comma delimited file, edited that with excel and reimported it.

If I remember correctly I ended up make one entry within the program for each class that I was going to add elements then added the balance in the exported file and then reimported it once complete.

The only entry needed in the _sql file is the index number for the total number of elements within the table.

The mod_listings table actually stores the elements content within each listing when the field is populated so I dont think any of them will show except under the edit listing or add listing until you add content to the custom field within the listing itself.  Hope that helps.. good luck

[Anonymous]

Hey Thanks Tracy! I finally got it to work.  It is sooo much easier to use an app like Excel to manage large numbers of fields.

I learned that the problem was that CocoaMySQL (the Mac OSX MySQL client) didn't like the CSV files that Excel produced because they didn't have the values enclosed by double quotes ("value","value").  Once I got around that, it imported like a charm.