i have been getting the following datacare error for quite awhile and would like to know if there is anything i can do about it. accpac's integrity check does not find any problems, i have viewed the table and cannot see anything wrong myself. any ideas ?

Checking flat file SADETAIL
*** '??ysis]????d?on ??'?'
errors in fields (264775)
*Fail*
Character field
'Customer number'invalid (0037)
*** No SADCHECK for this entry
*Fail*

Dear Mmeier

DataCare does a more thorough check than either WSM DIC or FixIt, by checking the flat and keyed files within some applications' datafiles.

By looking at the error messages you have detailed, it looks as though you are using an older version of DataCare and/or older versions of Computer Associates' or Softrak's Sales Analysis, as the current release of DataCare checks the extra fields for:

CA Sales Analysis 6.0A, 6.1A
Softrak Sales Analysis 6.1B, 6.2A, 6.5A

You can do one the following to correct this issue:
1. Purchase an upgrade for DataCare
2. Go into DataCare's Configure option and turn off the flat and keyed file check for SA.

PS The fact that your SA files start with "SA" indicates that either you are not using a Y2K compliant version of SA (Softrak SA files now start with "SR" & CA's SA is not Y2K and is no longer in production), or that you are pointing to a drive and directory where older version SA is installed.

Hope this helps.

the version of datacare that i have is dc6.5a. i reinstalled it on friday to see if that would help, but still have the same trouble. as for turning off the flat
and keyed file check for sa, i do not want to do that, as it would seem to defeat the purpose of having datacare at all. the error has only appeared recently and version 6.5a was installed before the error occured.

as for the sales analysis version, i believe it is y2k compliant. it is sales analysis 990118 v6.1a and i gather that this means the sa data directory is current as well.

any more ideas ?

Dear Mmeier,

The flat file checking for DataCare was introduced in version 6.2A. If you started to get these errors after upgrading to either DataCare versions 6.2A or 6.5A, then that suggests these errors have existed for longer than that.

The error you mentioned indicates that for a specific transaction record, invalid characters were found in the customer number field. There is no indication which specific record has this error, but the (264775) refers to the byte offset in the file.

If you want to investigate further, there are a couple things you can do:

- Make sure that you run DataCare for this data using the Verbose diagnostic mode, which will write the most detailed information to the error log file. It might give more specific information as to which record has the error, depending on how many characters are wrong.

- If you have Quik Reports, you can use this to try and determine which record is wrong, as it uses a similar table for reading data as DataCare does for the field checking. To do this, create a new report on the Sales Analysis transaction file, and put Customer Number into the report along with a couple of other identifying fields, such as invoice number and invoice date. Sort the report by customer number ascending (so that problem records will be either at the very top of the very bottom) and print the report to screen - to save paper. This may be able to pinpoint more specifically which records have problems.

The only actions you can do are either live with the errors or have the data repaired. The latter option may be difficult if there are hundreds of these errors, as I believe they would have to be corrected one by one.