I also did not see the box number in the download file which was promised for a future release months ago.

Guys, the site is good, but I need to be able to manage the sale of my comics from outside the website (offline) too.  Ideally, this would be accomplished by including a way for me to export the data to a database friendly flat file (see SQL Server data transformation services for an example of this) and the file would include the box number for finding the location of the comics.

Think about this... maybe I would like to let my 10 year old daughter help me pull comics for shipping from the appropriate box.  Since I have over 100 boxes, I might like an alphabetic printout of the Titles along with the Box Numbers where they are located.  Armed with this printout, my daughter could easly find the comics that need to be shipped.

So, I have to ask, is the "download entire collection" feature going to be reinstated and is the box number ever going to be added to the download file (or am I wasting my time waiting on this feature)?

I just noticed that there are now miscellaneous comments in the download file like "Jim Starlin art" of "Reprints Avengers".  I have no use for this information in my download file.  I need to export this data to Access or another database format so that I can manage it myself and having these types of "issue comments" (on a separate line) just muddies the water.

What I am trying to get across is that the Excel file may NOT be the end of the line for some of your users.  For me, it is the beginning.  I need to port the Excel file (or better yet a delimited text file) to another database that I can manipulate myself.  This is not difficult to write as I have done it myself numerous times.

Please try to provide a clean file download option to those of us that want to manipulate the data beyond the capabilities that CPG provides. Is this doable, or am I dreaming?

I wrote a parser against the last version of the CPG Excel file that ported the data to Access and I started writing a program that would allow me to simply select what I wanted to sell from my local database and let the program generate the eBay text. I also planned to use my parser application to periodically download the CPG Excel file and update the prices on the local database.

Now that the CPG Excel file format has changed, a do-over is required. However, before I rewrite this code, I wanted to make this plea to the powers that be.

If CPG could just give us a flat file with vertical bar delimited fields and one row per record with the fieldnames in the first row that would be great. Something similar to this:

This plain format would solve all of my problems and it would be great to have.

But, there is an even better idea...

If CPG provided a web service that gave us access to our data, I could write a program or maybe even a little web page and I could sell my comics directly based upon my data located at CPG. This would be the ultimate fix because then I wouldn't have to maintain two databases and try to keep them in sync. I would even pay more for this service.

I know less about the web services technology (but I have written code to get the weather from the Weather Channel via a webservice), so I don't know how doable it is from a coding standpoint.  However, I am sure that the delimited text file is a layup (and would be much easier to write than a formatted Excel file) and it could be added without too much effort.

Please consider making our raw data available to us soon. I would appreciate hearing what the site authors have to say about either of the suggestions I have posed here. 

Thanks,

Mark