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In the import wizard, where decision is made to import into a gridor a DB table, a button could be added to open the CREATE TABLE form,prefilled with the columns defined in the step before (types aredefined here, and the needed size of e.g. varchars is determined as themax. length found in each "string" column).

Furthermore the action "import table data" should be providednot (only) within the context menu of one table, since importing into agrid is not specific to any existing table.

Regarding finding out the max length: Maybe it would make sense to determine length by looking at the first 100 lines or so, but provide a button to carefully check by looking at all records - it is especially boring in large files to find out reasonable length settings if you want to stay as compact as possible.

Furthermore it would be very helpful to provide a button "check field data types" which is looking for every column the most strict possible types - numbers (float or integer), dates, or strings. If importing data from external sources where the structure is not well known that would help much - e.g. customer codes are sometimes integers, sometimes they hold letters occasionally. Maybe it would even be possible to make suggestions for NULL values.

Even more helpful it could be to provide a button to check if columns hold unique values - to allow setting a single existing column as primary key.

Another very helpful extension would be to allow defining a regular expression for every field (and maybe one for the whole record too) to check which fields do not conform to the pattern - this would be very powerful for design of the needed table. It could be even possible to create new columns by use of the capture groups ( "(...)" ) defined in the regex pattern. Allowing to store the regex under a name (e.g. "ISO-Date" or "ISBN-CODE") would increase productivity even more.

Anyway it would make sense to spend some effort in import wizard, since (often not so well structured) excel files as data source are nearly omnipresent, I think.

Tanks for the very helpful tool.

Max Renkin