Getting Ready
A little preparation is required. First, you will need to install a copy of the appropriate plug-in for either QuarkXPress or InDesign: InCatalog for InDesign and Xcatalog for Quark. You will find demo versions of these plugins in the 3rd-Party Demos folder within your CatBase folder, or you can download them from our web site (see the links at the bottom of this page). Install them as follows:
- Xcatalog: Copy the appropriate version of the plug-in into the Xtension folder in your Quark application folder
- InCatalog: Copy the appropriate version of the plug-in into the Plug-ins folder in your InDesign CS application folder
You will also need a copy of the Xtags plugin for Quark or InDesign. There are demo versions in the 3rd Party Demos folder in your CatBase folder, or you can download them using the links at the bottom of this page. Copy them into the appropriate plugins folder, as described above.
Next CatBase needs to know which fields you want to enable for linking up, as it will insert special tags around those fields when you publish the data. There are two steps to take to set this up.
- On the Prefs page of your Publishing Style Sheet, select the appropriate check box in the Data Linking area. In the example shown here, two tables have been set up for the database (Pictures and Photographers) and we want to link up some fields in the Pictures table:
- Data Descriptor: this is a text file that will be created when the data is published. It describes the linked fields to the page layout program. CatBase supplies a name for this file: you can change it if you want to.
- In the Element for the field that you want to link up, go to the Preferences tab and select the Create an Xcatalog/Incatalog Link for this Element check box:
- Do this for each field that you want to link up
Publishing the Data
- Publish your data from CatBase in the usual way. If your page layout program is InDesign, use the InDesign with Xtags publishing destination.
- Import the published data into your page layout template using the Get Text with Xtags option(if this isn't available on your File menu, then you haven't installed the Xtags plug-in!)
- When the data is in the document, choose Show Data Linker from the Xcatalog/InCatalog menu if the Xcatalog Data Linker palette is not already displayed. If you don’t have an Xcatalog or InCatalog menu, then you have not installed the Xcatalog/InCatalog plugin. The Data Linker palette looks like this:
If you would like to see which fields are linked, choose Show Link Markers from the Xcatalog menu. Linked fields are shown with a grey background:
If it doesn't appear like this in your document, choose Show Link Markers from the Xcatalog/Incatalog menu.
If you select a linked field, its details will be shown in the Data Linker palette:
The Field reference may appear rather meaningless to you, but it tells Xcatalog/InCatalog and CatBase precisely which table, record, and field the link belongs to.
Updating the data in the Document
So you've spent some time finalising the layout of the catalogue: perhaps you have moved a few things around, added or changed some graphics, fixed a few bad page breaks, and so on. And then you find out that some of the prices have changed. No problem!
- Update the prices as necessary in the database.
- Select the records that you need to update (for example, the products that have had price changes)
- Click the Publish button at the top of the window and select the Publishing Style Sheet that you used to publish the data. It is vital that you use the same Publishing Style Sheet, otherwise the update file probably won't include all the necessary data and the update will fail.
- Select the Publishing Destination InDesign with Xtags if you are using InDesign, or QuarkXPress if you're using Quark
- Select the XCatalog Update check box
- Publish the data.
- Go to your Quark or InDesign document
- Make sure that it has been saved
- Make sure that the Data Linker palette is displayed
- Choose Update Document ... from the Xcatalog or InCatalog menu
- Select the update file you just created
- In the Select File dialogue, make sure that the Partial Data snapshot (missing keys OK) check box is selected
- Click the Open button
Watch in amazement as your data is updated!
Updating the Database From the document
You’ve completed the layout for your catalogue and sent a proof off to the product manager to review. Unfortunately, she spots a number of mistakes in the product descriptions, or decides that some of them are too long or inaccurate or whatever: the end result is that you end up with a document containing product descriptions that no longer match the information in the database. Fortunately, you had flagged the product descriptions as linked fields in your Publishing Style Sheet. Here’s how you proceed with the database update:
- Make sure you have saved the document
- Choose Create Data from the Xcatalog or InCatalog menu
- You will see a Create data snapshot save dialogue, with the file name data.tsv entered into the file name area
- Make sure you know where the file is going to be saved (and change the destination if necessary), change the name of the file if you want to, then click the Save button
- This will create a file that contains the record number of each record, plus the data from the linked fields, in a tab-delimited text file. A simple example, in which only two fields have been linked, might look like this:
“15” “£200.00” “£120.00”
“16” “£150.00” “£90.00”The first column contains the database record numbers (“15” and “16”) and the other two columns contain two price fields (Price Mounted and Price Unmounted in our Demo database).
- Now you simply need to use this file to update the prices in your database (please see Chapter 7: Importing Data, in the Reference Manual for detailed instructions on how to do this).