I'm only new at WebFocus and have been trying to upload an excel file to create a master file but receiving errors for dates and numbers.

I'm using Upload Data file from the menu under Master Files.

The data is all showing as character data in the grid where I can change the type of each field.

The dates are A50 and displayed as dd/mm/yyyy.
Numbers are the same but showing as numbers with 2 decimal places.

When I change the date to Type date and Format DMYY then apply, I receive the following error:
Unable to modify column metadata
Invalid date format found on line etc etc

The same happens when trying to convert numbers.

I have tried every file format for the upload file and also changed the formats of these columns in Excel but nothing works.

What am I doing wrong?

WebFocus version 7703

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kathryn Henning>,

Hi SuziQ,

I am quite new to WF, with three 3 years experience and I am running 7703. I created a test file on my desktop, the top row had the field names Date, Name, Amount1 and Amount2.
My date format was DD/MM/YYYY (14/10/2014) etc;
Name format AAAAAAAA (Fred) etc
Amount1 Integers (10, 20) etc
Amount2 two decimal places (10.21) etc.

After selecting New Upload Data file and browsing to my file, I made sure File Format Excel radio button was checked, along with the First row contains field names and selected Next.

In the top left of the screen I have:
Field Name: DATE Type Alphanumeric
Alias DATE Format A50.

I used the drop down on type and changed it to DATE, change format to MDYY and hit apply.

I then selected Name which is in blue and underlined in the grid and the details appeared in the top left, type was Alphanumeric and Format was A50, So I just hit Apply again.

I then selected Amount1 in blue again and changed type to Integer and left the format as I6 and hit apply again.

I then Selected Amount2, which came up as Double D12.2 So I left this and hit apply.

In the bottom of the screen a changed FileName TESTLOAD to TESTLOADB ( just because I could) and selected my application and hit next.

When I created a report from the Master and data came across ok.

Hi Mark

Thank you for the information. I had done exactly that for my file, so I decided to set up a test.xlsx file as per your test and everything worked.

With that, I decided to look through the data which came from somewhere else and found one row with all nulls! Once I removed that row, everything worked perfectly. A trap for young players, check the data first.