I finally finished my write-up to provide some tips on writing conversion code using Pace-Trace. As usual, I ended up spending more time on it than I expected, but hopefully with a valuable byproduct. It is hard to cover this topic without getting into the debate regarding which development platform is best-suited for conversion modules. In short, I believe Component Interface is the best approach if you are not sure you can perform the necessary validations outside of PeopleSoft. That said, I believe someone with a careful eye to ensure required fields and prompt values are populated correctly via SQL by using a staging table will still find the entire conversion process (from design, development, and testing) much faster, easier, and successful by building an SQR from a trace file. Again, read the whole entry to get the full story.

As an aside, I found an awesome free tool today that handles that nasty problem of not being able to delete files because Windows thinks (incorrectly) that it is in use by another application. This will be definitely added to my “bag of tricks.” The tool is called Unlocker, and you can download the tiny (192K) application for free here:
http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/