Making I.T. Happen
Accounting and Information Technology, Assistance and Support
Import Plus Installation

Import plus is easy to install, however, there are a few steps and these need to be done in the right sequence, skipping steps, and doing things out of sequence are the main problems

WARNING: Version 30 onwards the 64bit version is not supported, if you have the 64 bit already installed, you can uninstall and reinstall.

If you are not confident, please call us, and we can do the installation for you.

•  1/Download
•  2/Run installer
•  3/Get customiser
•  4/Set Datapath, username and password
•  5/Register

1/ Download the installation package 

• You can download it  here
  • If the link above does not work, go to this page and at the very bottom of the page look for import plus "multi" and download that version.

2/ Run the installation package.

• If you are on a network, then you should do a server installation complete all these steps and then, after completing the rest of the steps and everything is working on the server, you can use the "workstation setup" application on the server to install to all the workstations.

   

  • Install the application into a shared directory using the server or classic install option, the users must have full access rights. 
    
    I like to use the existing share for Sage 50, making a folder called Skyewright in it, I do this because it should already have access rights to be accessible to all sage users.
    
    
•  If you are a single user, do a full install with all the defaults
  
•  NOTE that Sage50 should be installed on the PC that ImportPlus runs on. *

3/ Get your customiser

•  Open ImportPlus Driver as administrator by right clicking and choosing "Run As Administrator" (and go to Basic mode if not already there) 
•  go to Tools>Collect and install customiser press Run
•  enter your script code this will look something like this  mih-default
  •  After installation of the customiser, you will have a new option in Tools "Update your customisers" you can use this to pick up and apply any new code written for you. 

4/ Set your datapath, username and password

•  Open ImportPlus Driver In Basic mode, on the lower left of the screen, the is a box Titled Location.  In this box you need to enter the path to your Sage data (including the accdata) 
  •  You can set this by running the "Build company Path Selector" in tools and then selecting the company from the Company section.
  • You can also set it manually - you can find the current data path in Sage Help>About>
  • When you have selected your datapath the name of your company should appear in the box labeled description along with the Sage Version details.
    
•  Enter a Sage 50 username in the Logon box (it is best to have a dedicated username for importing eg "import")
  
•  Enter the associated password in the password box, if there is one
  •  You can have the password memorised, to do this go >Advanced>Connection>Remember Password (Tick Box) then return to Basic View
•  I recommend creating a user specifically for the import tasks, this prevents issues with the username already being in use and means you do not have to log out of Sage to run imports.

5/ Register your software and Request a Licence 

•  Open ImportPlus Driver (go to Basic mode if not already there)
•  go to Tools>Request Licence and press run
•  Fill in your details (accept the default licence options)

Licensing - There is an initial 14 day trial during which some splash screen can not be prevented, if we know who you are a provisional licence is issued within a day or two, this will behave as a full licence, full licences are issued once paid for, licensing is automatically picked up and applied in background.  In some rare situations this may not function, in which case we can send the keys by email and you can manually enter them.

Workstation installations

•  On the workstation with admin rights navigate to the skyewright directory on the server file share. Execute the "SkyewrightWorkstationSetup" program you will find there. (You want to have the share mapped as a drive letter
•  Open import plus and it will prompt you to navigate to the skyewright\system directory on the server file share. 
•  You need to repeat steps on each workstation.  (You can also use the installation package and select the workstation option)
  

Issues:-

Dialogue Screen Size:  when you open ImportPlus after It has had it's customisation, the "operation" window may be small, and it may be hard to see your customisers. You can drag the edges of the window to make it larger. 

Not Complete  This message indicates something has gone amiss, it may be something trivial like a file could not be downloaded (perhaps the internet was out for a moment) or there could be bad data being fed to the system (a non existent account) or lots of other possible issues.  Reading the results screen normally gives you enough information to see what the problem is.

You can view previous results by right clicking on any customiser and choosing "show most recent result" or "select and show a recent result file" results are kept for several days.

Excel and CSV  If you have problems with your csv source data it is tempting to edit it and fix it. Excel is the common tool used to do this and it can be a huge problem, it will frequently convert data inappropriately e.g. the customer reference MAR001 may be interpreted as a date and converted to 01/03/2015 when you save your excel sheet.  Leading zeros can be removed from numbers, blank lines might not be visible and  lot more.  There are 2 tools that are pretty safe, NotePad (or any other pure text editor NotePad++ vi etc, Do not use wordpad it is not a text editor) The problem with text editors is that CSV is not very human friendly in a text file.  If notepad is too much for you try CSVED it is a free csv file editor.  If you must use Excel, backup your file first and watch out for conversions.

Support ImportPlus has some extra tools for support they are in the "tools" group. 
    Connect to Bruce, is a desktop sharing tool this give remote control to Bruce, please do not use this unless you are on a support call.
    Send Diagnostics to Bruce, sends recent logs & source data to Bruce for investigation.
    Update your customisers, get the latest code form the repository and loads it into your installation
    Update ImportPlus, when you upgrade Sage you will also need to upgrade import plus.  This tool get the latest version for you to install.

FailSafe  ImportPlus fails to a safe position, that is it will either do an import completely or not at all it will not do a partial import.  If you have a process that has multiple imports, it is possible to fail at a point where things are partly done and where you can't just carry on.  If you have this sort of process, you should take backups of interim files before doing anything else or call for help.

Command Line / Shell execution / Scheduled Task / Batch File / Shortcut

Advanced mode is typically disabled, you can enable it using the Enable Advanced Mode in the Tools Group, there is also a tool to disable it when you are finished.
Some of the following needs advanced mode enabled.

Right click on a Customiser in the gui and chose "Show Command Line"

If you want to run from VBA or another programming language, copy the command line from above into a shell command (replace the parts you want with your own text), 

You can schedule the command line as a task.

You can use the command line in a batch file.

You can use the command line to make a shortcut.

When using in Batch, Shell or Command line, after execution import plus set the "errorlevel" environment variable to 0 to indicate it's success, other values indicate the type of issue encountered, you can refer to the feedback results / log files for detailed information.

If you want to specify and input file(s) normally adding -input and then the path to the file (or  wildcarded path to files) will work

Frequently Used Additional Options

-input <path to source file>

-3pPass - The Password option contains the password in an hashed form, you can use the password in plain text if you want.

-clx - The command lines can be too long and exceed the 255 character limit, you can work around this by putting the command options in a "clx" file and then passing the CLX file on the command line with a -clx option. Right clicking on a customiser will give you the option to make a clx file for it.

You can mix and match, putting most of the parameters in a clx file and passing the clx and others on the command line.

-mode

You can use a combination of modes by separating them with commas 

eg:     "nosplash,qr,nolist,taciturn,tool,psd=-1"

The help file has lots more information about all the options.

If you have any other requirements, or need any further help please call 03333 445950

Upgrades

To upgrade, follow the instructions here

* Import plus can be installed on a machine without Sage but you need to speak to us as you will need to install other files, in normal use it is easier to just install Sage.