vitalnix user management suite 3.2.0


Description

An SDF file is a text file, where each object occupies one line. Empty lines are ignored. The structure of a User Object is similar to a CSV file; in SDF, the values are separated by a semicolon. Below is the schematic description is a real-world example.

[enum;]surname;firstname;bday;pvgrp
(* one-line comment *)
# new-style comment

1;Engelhardt;Jan;12.3.45;Grade 13;

The different fields are:

Comments

Comments are Pascal-style or similar to shell and C, as shown in the syntax above, they either begin with a hash mark in the first column, or start with (* and end with *). Both comment types only last for the particular line. The hash-mark style comment may be unsupported within Kolleg. Comments can only begin in the first column.

Portability issues

The only application I know that exports SDF files is "Kolleg" (a secretary program for German schools). It is a DOS/16 program and thus exports in CP437 encoding and CRLF mode. Since it is just like CSV format, there is no indication of what fields describe what. If the SDF created by your Kolleg program varies from the spec above, you need to change the parser to properly recognize it, or contact the Vitalnix Project.

StarOffice also seems to export something with the .sdf extension, but it is not related!

Naming

I think SDF stands for "Schülerdatenformat".