Interface to Document Locator

AQT has an interface to the Document Locator document management system by ColumbiaSoft.

Enabling the Interface to Document Locator

To enable the interface to DL, you need to:

• have the Document Locator client installed and configured on your PC
• set Options > General > Enable interface to Document Locator
• specify other options related to the interface at Options > Document Locator

Selecting Document Locator Files

Once the interface to DL has been specified, whenever you select files or directories you will have the option of:

• selecting a file/directory on your local disk (as per normal)
• selecting a file/directory from the Document Locator repository

You can use a DL directory for your Saved Queries directory, however may not use it for your default directory (which AQT uses for work files).

Whenever AQT needs a file located in the DL repository it will frist export the file from the repository to a directory on your PC. Similarly, whenever AQT writes to a DL file, it will first write to a file on your PC then import the file to the repository. There is some overhead associated with the export and import operations. Consequently it is not recommended that you use the DL repository for work files or other files that are read and written frequently.

Specifying Document Locator Files

You can specify that AQT is to use a DL file by specifying a filename in the following format:

(DL)repository-name\Documents\directory\filename

Examples:

(DL)demo\Documents\query1.sql

(DL)demo\Documents\Export Files\employees.csv

(DL)demo\Documents\Saved Queries\employee_summary.sql

Exporting to a Document Locator files

Some notes on this are given at Exporting to a Document Locator file

History Files

You can use a DL directory for holding History Files. This works as follows

• when an AQT session starts, it will read the existing History File from the DL repository to a local history file
• during the AQT session, AQT will write to the local history file
• when the AQT session closes, AQT will import the local history file to the DL repository

There are three complications to this:

• an AQT session crashes, or is unable to import the local history file to the DL repository
• the user is running multiple AQT sessions, each writing to the same local history file
• AQT runs over a date change when it must switch to another history file

To deal with these:

• AQT crashes. To deal with this - when AQT starts, if it finds an existing local history file, it will not fetch the history file from the repository. Instead it will continue writing to the existing local history file.
• Multiple AQT sessions are an awkward issue. All sessions will write to the same local file without problem, however the first session that finishes will import the file to the DL repository then delete the local file from the disk. The remaining session(s) will create and write-to a new local file. This will only contain the history records from that point on. When this session finishes, this truncated local file will be imported to the repository as a new version of the history file.

  History records will not be lost, as will be present in earlier versions of the history file in the repository, however this could be a confusing situation for the user. As a result it is not recommended to run multiple AQT sessions when using the DL repository for holding history files.

• This isn't supported. AQT will write to the same history file throughout the AQT session and import this to DL when the session ends.

Using Document Locator with work files

It is not recommended that you use Document Locator to hold work files, such as:

• the report and error files using by the Data Loader
• the report file, SQL files and difference file used by Data Compare

The reason for this is as follows:

• when these processes start, the work files are deleted
• the process may or may not write to the work files. This will depend, for instance, on whether any error conditions were hit. At the end of the process, the work files may still not exist.
• the empty files will not be imported into the Repository. The Repository will contain the files when they last were imported as non-empty files. This may have been from some earlier run of the Load or Compare, and different files could be for different runs.

This can result in misleading and confusing information for the user.