Lawson has provided a utility for loading data into a Lawson database from a comma-seperated values (csv) file: importdb.

importdb is a program that allows you to load (import) data into a Lawson table from a comma-seperated values (csv) file.

The only reason I'm including this in the advanced page for LawsonTech.com is that two parameters used together can be very powerful.

Let me give you a quick example:

Say you've loaded data from an external source into Lawson and you find out that in some of the records you have one column/field that is incorrect.

Your choices would be to either delete everything from the table and reload or (if we're only talking 100 rows/records go ahead and reload) update the value in the column/field that is incorrect.

With importdb -fu (fu means that the input file has field headers and to do an update) you can extract the columns/fields that make up the primary key and the invalid column/field from your external data source in a comma-delimited format, create a heading that is "Lawson-friendly" and run importdb -fu from that file.

This will update only the values in the table/file based on the non-primary key columns/fields included in the file.