The X Files Episode List

I came across Norman L. Lim's X Files page http://members.aol.com/normlim/xfiles/xfiles.html and was inspired to create a List database based on this information. First I contacted Norman to obtain permission to do so, since I wanted to be able to distribute the database with List as an example database. He kindly gave me permission and to my suprise Norman turned out to be a Pilot user too!

Step one was to convert the information from the web pages into a regular text file. I did this by simply copying and pasting from my web browser.

I then preformed a search/replace to change all of the ,'s (commas) to \, so that the listdb.exe program would not treat the comma as a field delimiter. I also decided that each season would have its own category. So for example:


THE X-FILES (1X01)
Original Broadcast Date : 9/10/94
Written by Chris Carter
Directed by Robert Mandel

Agent Fox Mulder, a former FBI fast-tracker whose career has spiraled since his interest in the paranormal began, is teamed up with Agent Dana Scully a medical doctor whom the FBI hopes will debunk his theories. The pair is called into investigate a series of strange deaths involving high school classmates in a small Pacific Northwestern town.

Billy Miles by Zachary Ansley
Smoking Man by William B. Davis
Mr. Jay Nemman by Cliff DeYoung
Theresa Nemman by Sarah Koskoff
Detective Miles by Leon Russom


Became something like:


Season 1
THE X-FILES (1X01)
Original Broadcast Date : 9/10/94
Written by Chris Carter
Directed by Robert Mandel

Agent Fox Mulder\, a former FBI fast-tracker whose career has spiraled since his interest in the paranormal began\, is teamed up with Agent Dana Scully a medical doctor whom the FBI hopes will debunk his theories. The pair is called into investigate a series of strange deaths involving high school classmates in a small Pacific Northwestern town.

Billy Miles by Zachary Ansley
Smoking Man by William B. Davis
Mr. Jay Nemman by Cliff DeYoung
Theresa Nemman by Sarah Koskoff
Detective Miles by Leon Russom

And after removing all of the carriage returns from the text, each episode became a single line of text -- exactly what listdb.exe requires as input. The header information goes on the first line of the file and specifies the database name, custom field lables and categories. Thus the first few lines of the .csv file I created are:


X-Files Episode Guide,Episode,Number,Season 1,Season 2,Season 3,Season 4,Season 5
Season 1,THE X-FILES,1X01,Original Broadcast Date : 9/10/94,Written by Chris (...)
Season 1,DEEP THROAT,1X02,Original Broadcast Date : 9/17/93,Written by Chris (...)
Season 1,SQUEEZE,1X03,Original Broadcast Date : 9/24/93,Written by Glen Morgan (...)
Season 1,CONDUIT,1X04,Original Broadcast Date : 10/1/93,Written by Alex Gansa (...)
(etc..)

I then use the listdb.exe program to convert this into a List database, used the Install tool to install it onto my Pilot1000. Once it was on the Pilot I used the customization dialog to change the display style from "field1/field2" to "field2/field1" this means that the second field will be used to sort the episodes. I found that this was more useful than the alphabetic sorting of the episode names since I tend to think of the episodes by number, not name.

[XFiles Screen Shot]

Credits: Norman L. Lim compiled the XFiles episode guide from the original Fox press releases. The List database was created by Andrew Low. The information is provided "as is", we hope you find it useful.