[sims] Export of all the fields that exist in SIMS

[winng]

I’m looking to get an export of all the fields that exist in SIMS, plus data type (e.g. Date, Free Text)…how feasible is this?

[LosOjos]

You can design reports to export almost all of the data SIMS holds, but not the data types. SQL will of course* hold the relevant data types, but the SIMS SQL DB is hugely complex and you'd be ill advised to mess with it.

 

What are you trying to achieve?

 

* at least, you'd certainly hope so!

 

EDIT: actually it's just occurred to me that if you set the output type to XML, you get the schema which would contain the data types. Then it's up to you to transform the XML to fit your needs.

 

EDIT 2: the challenge intrigued me... this is only a very basic example, but hopefully will get you started if you want to churn through some XML. This will only work with basic reports (i.e. no subreports) and will format weirdly for missing elements (it doesn't do any kind of checking of nodes, just creates a table from the schema then assumes all nodes are present, which they'll almost certainly not be ) but it was fun having a play with some XSL. Apply this XSL to an XML SIMS report, then open the XML in IE (Chrome/FF will block it) and you should have a formatted HTML table of all the data it contains plus the data type (as stated by the schema):

 

	
		
			
				<br />
						html {<br />
							font-family: sans-serif;<br />
							-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;<br />
							-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;<br />
						}<br />
						<br />
						table {<br />
							margin:0px;<br />
							padding:0px;<br />
							width:100%;<br />
							border:1px solid #000;<br />
							border-collapse: collapse;<br />
						}<br />
						<br />
						table td {<br />
							border: 1px solid #000;<br />
						}<br />
						<br />
						table thead {<br />
							color: #fff;<br />
							font-weight: bold;<br />
							background: #005fbf;<br />
						}<br />
<br />
					
			
			
				
					
						
							
						
					
					
						
					
				
			
		
	
	
	
		
	
	
	
		
			
		
	
	
	
		
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Edited November 4, 2015 by LosOjos

[SimonCygnetIT]

Echoing LosOjos I to am intrigued as to what you are wanting to achieve with this? Are you looking to write some kind of app that reads and writes data directly in to SIMS? As well as obtaining the, very huge, list of fields within the SIMS database you would also need to understand the relationships between the tables and the fields. This again is massively complex.