Updating card deck - download failure

Updating card deck - download failure

Postby MikeFedeski » Sun Jan 16, 2011 4:18 pm

Dear Ernie

First, I would like to say that Flashcards Deluxe is an excellent app in every way. It gives far more control to the user than most iPhone apps (the sort of thing one used to see in Palm apps), care has been taken at every step to ensure ease of use, it looks good, and it offers more than any other flash card app that I have looked at (and I looked at quite a few). I'm still exploring some of its capability, and when I'm ready, I will be giving it a huge thumbs up in iTunes.

A few weeks ago I created a deck using Microsoft Word and Excel on a PC, and successfully downloaded it to my iPhone4 by cutting and pasting to your upload page from the Excel sheet. I used Word because it makes it easy to enter accented characters (this is a French vocabulary deck), and Excel because it allows me to move things around easily. The download was amazinghly straightforward.

I have been adding and correcting cards as I use the deck, and came to the point where I wanted to make some major changes on the desktop. So I exported the deck to your server, and downloaded it to my computer from there, all without any detectable error. I opened the text file in Word, converted there from text to table, and made my changes. I also removed the lines at the top of the file that listed the categories, so that the top line left was the one with the column headings in it. Although the resulting file uploads to your server without error, it will not download to my iPhone. Either I get a two-card deck with the card telling me that the file could not be found on the server, or I get an error message saying "The text tile could not be read. Did you save it in UTF-8 format?"

I have tried uploading the file as a cut and paste from an Excel file, and from the Word file itself. I have tried leaving off the statistics column. I have also tried sending back to myself the UFT-8 text file that I downloaded from the iPhone before the corrections, with and without the header rows. None of these attempts were successful.

I have tried to download to the iPhone using the Add Deck page from the '+' icon at the top of the Decks page folder in which the orignal deck is kept (and also direct in the top level Decks page) - I used a new Deck Code, treating it as a new download. I have also experimented with the Edit icon, to reach the Download page from there (for the 'replace' and 'append' options).

The file is large (1162 rows including the headers, 9 columns including the statistics column), but I have tried downloading smaller parts of it. There are no pictures or sound. The only feature this file has that my very first download file did not have is the pipes for in-cell line breaks. I have tried replacing these in excel with Alt-Return line breaks (as you suggested in an earlier post to someone else) and downloading that version, but this did not work.

I've run out of ideas, and do not know how to create a UFT-8 format file (although I can see the file downloaded from the iPhone is in that format when I open and "save as"). I expect I am doing something very silly - can you see what it is?

Mike
MikeFedeski
 
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Re: Updating card deck - download failure

Postby Ernie » Sun Jan 16, 2011 7:20 pm

Hi Mike,

Can you please post/email/PM me a deck code? It sounds like you uploaded to my server fine, but it won't download to your device. Maybe it was network problems with your device, or maybe there is some bug in the app that I don't know about. If I can try to download using your deck code, it may help to troubleshoot.

I see no reason why a download should fail after a successful website upload unless there is wi-fi issues.

Ernie
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Re: Updating card deck - download failure

Postby MikeFedeski » Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:09 am

Dear Ernie

Thank you for your reply. I tried a download to iPhone again just now, before responding to you, and it worked perfectly. I can only assume that it must have been the connection (although that looked OK). Could the error messages on my iPhone be generated if it were making no contact with your server at all? One question. Should pasting to your upload site from a Word table work as well as from an Excel spreadhseet?

Mike
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Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Jan 16, 2011 3:12 pm

Re: Updating card deck - download failure

Postby Ernie » Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:22 am

Glad it worked. Yeah, I think the message could happen if no connection was being made to my server... assuming a router (etc) was returning some error response.

I think simple Word tables will generally work fine... BUT, you can't have any line-feeds in a Word table. Quotes won't get added around these like when pasting form Excel. If you do use a word table with linefeeds, you'll need to convert to | before copy-pasting with a find-replace:
find-replace ^13 with |
Ernie
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