Automation for Actinic: Problems calling external programs when the Actinic products are linked to an external spreadsheet

Automation for Actinic: Problems calling external programs when the Actinic products are linked to an external spreadsheet

Automation for Actinic can call an external program, either as part of downloading orders or as a separate scheduled task (e.g. to create and upload a Googlebase feed for all of your Actinic sites at 5:30pm each day). If your Actinic products are linked to an external spreadsheet (or another program that only allows 1 program to access the data at a time) the external progam may have problems accessing the Actinic product data.

To get around this problem you need to close Actinic just before calling the external program. To do this you should use the following approach.

This example is based upon running the Product Mash for the current Actinic site, but the same principle works for all other programs called from Automation for Actinic.

Replace the following line in the Automation for Actinic settings:

C:\Program Files\MoleEnd\Utilities\FroogleMash\V8\ME_FroogleMash.exe" -B -M -U -F Googlebase <Window>

with

C:\Program Files\Actinic v7\RunProductMash.cmd <Window>

and then create a batch and save it in the C:\Program Files\Actinic v7 directory called RunProductMash.cmd with the following contents:

C:\Program Files\Actinic v7\Catalog.exe /q
C:\Program Files\MoleEnd\Utilities\FroogleMash\V8\ME_FroogleMash.exe" -B -M -U -F Googlebase %1

You can find out more information on using the Product Mash with multiple Actinic sites in the Product Mash documentation (
http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/ME_FroogleMashDef.html).