We frequently update our site to reflect new information and features our visitors request, so if you don't see your question answered here, please send us an email. We will answer your question within one business day and may choose to add it to this list for the convenience of our other users.

Report Writer Questions

Other Features

Other Concerns

The system does not recognize the single quotation mark (‘) as feet at this time. Please use “ft” to signify feet.

Please note, if this is one of the context sensitive tables such as Type, Sub Type, or Product Line that depend on the value of another field, you should filter your record selection by the value of that field also. For example, if you are trying to eradicate a value in the Sub Type table for a particular Type, then do your record selection by the category, type and the sub type to get the list of items that need to be changed.

While an item may occur only once in the database, it may have multiple inventory segments associated with it. In this case, the item will appear on a report once for each qualifying inventory record associated with the item. Since the field values in one or more fields may vary for different occurrences of the inventory segment, we designed the system to show all requested data for each record being displayed. It is also more logically consistent when record counts and summation of things like value are being done.

If more sophisticated report formatting capabilities are desired, we recommend that you extract files using the "Download" Feature of the system and then use any of a number of report writing tools available to process and format these records locally.

The Report Writer attempts to find a "best fit" for each field based on the number of fields and typical amount of data in each field being reported. It then determines a column width for each field accordingly. It will automatically split fields containing an "excess" of information to multiple lines. At the time of initial design, we felt this was a best compromise for the situation.

We are considering providing an option to allow the requestor to specify overriding field length limitations in a future release. If you feel such an enhancement would be of value to you, we urge you to lobby for this enhancement by sending an email urging this. Go to the Community section and select the "Tell us what you think" option.

The way to do this is also described in Tips & Techniques portion of this Help Section. Basically, use two additional record selection specification statements in addition to any others for your report. One should require the Purchase Date to be non-blank, and another should require the Sales Date to be blank.

Can you add the ability to store pictures with my collection database?

Can you add the ability to upload data from files stored on my local computer like the file download capability, only uploading instead of downloading?

We are currently working to provide this capability, hopefully in the next release expected to come out in a few months.

In the meantime, if you have digitized pictures of collection items, we recommend you record the file and other identifying information of where you have these stored in the Item Notes or Inventory Notes field of your database for reference.

This is actually a feature we very much want to add in a future release. There are a couple of design issues we need to address first. One issue with doing this is whether to add records directly to your database or to load them to a pending file that you can review before combining it with your existing edited data. Another issue is how to edit the input file so that the added records have integrity with respect to the edit tables. Should the feature simply add values to the edit tables as records are added from the uploaded input files or should it edit out those values that don't fit and somehow report on these? If this feature interests you, please help us design this feature by letting us know which options you would prefer via email.

Sometimes the system seems to be a little slow, especially when I first sign on. Why is this and how can I make it faster?

TrackMyTrains.com does most of its formatting and information processing work right on your computer. To do this, the website first downloads the programs (applets) and files you need to your computer the first time you need them. This is a communications line intensive activity. Once these have been sent from the host to your computer, most of the processing occurs right on your computer with little data transferred except when database updates are performed or reports or file extracts are downloaded back to your computer.

If the processing delays are only at the beginning of a session or a new function or during data downloads, it is most likely a telecommunications bandwidth issue. Using a faster modem or high-speed service such as DSL can improve data communications performance, particularly if you have a large database, but in our experience, rarely is there a significant delay due to telecommunications unless there is a "dirty" line or other intermittent problems with your service provider. If the slowness persists at times other than right after signing in or report downloads, then most likely there is a processor speed or memory issue with your computer and upgrading these should improve performance. This system has been designed so that it has rather modest processor and memory requirements relative to many other programs. A third area that may affect performance is your web browser software. The TrackMyTrains.com application is JAVA based, so it performs best on more recent editions of the popular web browsers, most of which deal very well with JAVA.