Sage 100

Sage 100 Premium 2018.2 The customer has a very simply VI Job to CI_Item 1 - Item number 2 - UDF (30 characters) They try to import from a FIXED WIDTH and when they try to import the UDF with 3 leading spaces for some reason Sage appears to strip those spaces and instead starts with the first non-blank. So instead of importing "" SAMPLE"" the customer reports ""SAMPLE"" being imported. I understand and appreciate the customer could use a tab or possibly comma delimited source file. My curiosity is more to this specific issue about whether there's a known issue with Sage trimming blanks in the leading portion of a fixed width import?

Testing this with a tab delimited and CSV - also appears to remove leading blank spaces

LOL .. Sage support: we are sorry all agents are busy ... please call back later ... Goodbye

Only workaround I was able to find was to insert a character such as . before the spaces. When I did that Sage imports that . and the spaces. I am pretty sure this is a defect that has been around for a while.

Try reading the UDF into a temp field, then make the UDF a calculation of the Temp field.

I just tried that on my system. Seems to react the same way. No matter what if there's a leading space the import seems to strip it out.

I remember going round and round with that as well - we ended up using a period as the leading character too.

On 2018.3, I see it's stripping out leading spaces during test and errors out on the actual import with ""Product Line is Required"". Tried to File Assign product line, but still errors out with same message. I don't recall having to include product line before.

I'm able to get an import to CI_Item using just item # and UDF. I'm not able to feed that UDF anything with leading blanks without them being stripped out.

Product Line Is Required = your item code was not found, and Sage thinks you are adding (not updating).

Sage called back. They suggested a variation of using a temp field and in the source use a different character than the "" "". Then use function sub() to swap the other character for an ascii representation of a space. I tried and it didn't work. I am pretty sure that someone ran into this before. At least it sounds familiar. For now I'm going to chalk it up to working as designed (stripping leading spaces).