Hello Ken,

Depending on the condition of your Q&A databases and the data contained inside, Translation into Sesame should be a relatively smooth process for you. Without knowing the details of your application, it's tough to say what your experience will be, but Support is here to help. You may want to read through the Q&A Translation Guide as it provides steps that will help you ensure your data is OK to translate (no bad fields/records, etc).

If you would like help with the entire translation and redesign process, our Focused Support sessions may be your best option. Focused Support sessions are paid blocks of time where you work on-on-one with a support representative on your application. These sessions are a great way to learn how to work in Sesame/Sesame Designer while still making progress on your application overhaul.

In addition to our Focused Support sessions, Lantica maintains a list of Sesame Professionals for users in need of full-fledged consulting help. When you have a moment, check out http://lantica.com/support/sesame_links.html.

Two problems you may run into that won't be immediately obvious:

If you have multi-line text fields containing double quotes, you'll need to replace those before doing the conversion.  It's possible you could have double quotes in a single-line field but incredibly unlikely.  Your best bet is to use a Mass Update to replace all " characters (ASCII 34) with a carat and then do the reverse update in Sesame.

To find these, search for .."..

Also, Q&A doesn't have "strong data typing" and Sesame does.  For instance, we have a QA app that contains a Money data type and our owner decided to differentiate record types by adding text, e.g., LIEN $2,392.61.  To deal with that it is necessary to:

1) In QA change the data type to Text
2) Do the Sesame translation
3) Add a Record Type field in Sesame
4) Do a Mass Update that populates the Record Type field
5) Do a Mass Update that corrects the data format for the Amount field
6) Change the data type for the Amount field to Money