Having just installed the SugarCRM product onto our 520 we thought we would share the experiences we had when trying to get the objects up to the web directory. The first problem we encountered was the product ships as a .zip file. We have mentioned previously that we found a nice FREE utility which allows the unzipping of archive files. Well the problem is the utility only unzips a .gz file and these are .zip files which use a different algorithm. So we thought we would unpack the zip file on a PC and pack it again using the GZIP utility for windows, that didnt work because it wont GZIP directories? So we looked for another i5 based zip utility which would allow us to unzip the objects directly on the i5, we found the PKUNZIP for i5 but it required a login etc before they would ship you a key for the trail period. We didnt have time for that so we decided to look at alternatives. We use a tool called MiFiles for FTP and it usually does pretty well when transfering the objects to FTP Servers so we unpacked the object and started an FTP process to the i5. Everytime it needed to build a library it cam back with an error message which we had to OK before it would go on. the funny thing was the directory which it said it could not create was actually created. The process took a long time just to build the initial directories and having to press enter for every message was not acceptable, I would have been there for about 5 hours (there are 2762 objects to upload).
So we then thought about mapping the i5 directory to a PC which had the ability to unpack a zip file (Windows XP come standard with this facility) and sure enough it works, the problem was it took almost as long as the FTP Transfers although it did work a bit quicker. As we had already mapped the directory to the PC we then tried to just drap and drop the files to the i5, this was the solution, it took less time than it took us to FTP the files to the Gentoo Linux box and put everything in the right place with the right permissions.
So if you need to copy files to the i5 I would suggest using the mapped drive approach, its far superior to anything else we tried. One option we did not try however was using client access transfers? Maybe next time?
Chris…