Things to watch out for when importing entries for XC races.

[Brian Agee]

Today I discovered two things to be aware of when importing entries:

1. MileSplit (and maybe AthleticNet) allow the event name to contain a comma. So when pulling the file in, this can cause all of the data to get pushed over by one column if you're not careful.

2. I discovered today that the OleDbDataAdapter the software is using to pull data from Excel will look at the first 8 rows (some say the first 25) and make an assumption on the datatype for that row. The problem is that if rows further down in the document do not match the expected data type then it doesn't return the data at all. As far as I'm aware, this only effects the "TeamCode" column, this year I'm seeing team codes come from MileSplit that are just numbers instead of letters. So in summary, if the first set of team codes in the file is numbers, but further down are letters, then it's very possible the letters will now appear in the Import screen in ART.

I've tried a couple of the recommended solutions I found online, but neither of them helped. I do know that you can open the file in Excel and turn around and save it as a CSV file and it will import correctly.

Here is more information on what I found:

[Dan Garman]

The comma issue also appears if there is a comma in a name.  Mine is a "lastname, Jr." in the LName field.