It may be the new Private Location fields which are causing the problem. I will check.

Thanks Mike,

Are you able to produce a bug-fix for this as it isn't good for this level of incompatibility within Recorder

Craig

Please can I have some views on what we should do about this issue

What we have been trying to so is to ensure that you can import from an older version of the database, but  we haven't been attempting to allow export from a newer version to an older version. In this specific instance the problem is caused by the two new private  fields in the  Sample table. I had assumed we would be able to solve this by always excluding these field from the export. but there is now a request to make the export of these fields optionally so always excluding them is no longer an option.

Maintaining backward compatibility so that newer version of R6 can export to earlier version requires some major changes somewhere. The uses of  resources on this is questionable for two reasons. Firstly, the problem can be solved by getting the  receiving system to upgrade, which is not a complicated process. Secondly, there may be situation where we can not maintain the compatibility - for example if the length or data type of a field is changed.