Is the AppExchange Data Loader 8.0 going to be released as open source? The last updated release on the SourceForge project page is version 7 released last February. Also, it appears that the samples contain some configuration to set up what appears to be a spring managed database connection. Is there documentation or plans for documenting this configuration?

I'm hoping that the answer is yes on both the questions since this release appears to have a lot of unsurfaced capabilities.

I've customized the dataloader code because some data, such as addresses, contains new line characters within the CSV file. This confuses not only Excel but also pretty everything else that we use to parse the CSV files. So I changed the CSVColumnVisitor.java file to replace carriage return and line feed characters with a vertical bar (aka pipe) character so that we can do something useful with the data.

Now I'm trying to build the code and things are not going well. Some files seem to be either missing or not building.

I've tried to rebuild the code on several different machines.

I've built it successfully within Eclipse on a Windows XP box and it runs with the code changes I made. Great! Now I just need to copy the sforcedataloader.jar file to my target system and I'm all set! Sorry, the jar file is an old one and does not contain my changes. So where is the new one? Apparently Eclipse didn't make one. Okay, then how is it running the new code? I have no idea.

Okay, so try a different way. I downloaded the zip file to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system. Got Java SDK 1.4.2-08, got ant, changed the code, tried a build and got an error trying to resolve a symbol. I investigated and found that there seems to be no source or class files related to the com.sforce.soap.partner packages! I have no idea why they would be missing.

Well, if I built it okay using Eclipse before perhaps that's the magic. So I install Eclipse. The latest version is 3.2 which requires Java 1.5. I install both, thinking that with Java 1.4.2 and 1.5 on the system I'll be able to use either one. I go ahead and build within Eclipse and it works! But still no updated jar file. Hmm, so what if I do 'ant jar_dataloader' from the command line? It works! I now have an updated jar file in a new jar directory. But it doesn't work. It won't work with Java 1.5, as you know. And when I try to use it with Java 1.4 I get a major.minor version mismatch error that indicates that I'm trying to use a 1.5 library or class with 1.4.

So at this point I'm pretty stumped. Any helpful ideas on how to get this code to actually build so that I can run the CLI on Linux would be greatly appreciated.