Lawson has provided a utility that has proven to be quite useful in everyday life with Lawson: rngdbdump.

rngdbdump is a program that allows you to dump (extract) data from a Lawson table to the standard output (you have to redirect the output if you want it to go to a spcific file).

The parameters for this command allow you to extract by a specific index, create a comma-delimited file, select rows/records based on criteria (although limited) and the speify the fields you want extracted.

Check out the parameters by typing rngdbdump at the UNIX command prompt and pressing the enter key.

One of the effective parameters I use is the -c parameter. This will create a comma-delimited file based on either the entire file or selection criteria entered. The comma-delimited file will contain column/field headings (unless you say otherwise).

You can use this file to load data into a spreadsheet or another database application.

One of the main reasons I use this option is so that I can then use the importdb command with the -fu options to update a range of records based on the values of the primary index. See importdb -fu on the menu for more information.