| Version 6 (modified by , 11 years ago) ( diff ) |
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Import Excel
We have an Importer which uses CSV files and works very well when the correct data is entered.
The limitations of CSV, however, are that there is no client-side Validation or Online Help, so it is very easy for users to input incorrect data (e.g. Dates).
We'd like to allow deployers to build custom Excel workbooks which have protected fields for the core data inputs (like those used for feeding Assessments to the Survey module) and can then add additional Online Help & client-side Validation. They can also be customised more easily for local contexts, such as providing localised names for the Location Hiearrchy rather than 'L1', 'L2', 'L3', etc
This project, therefore, is about designing a pre-processor for the current Importer back-end to allow .xls files to be uploaded & converting them to CSV before passing them to the current CSV importer.
NB This should also help us with ensuring that imported data is properly UTF-8. MS Excel tends to save CSVs as ANSI whilst it defaults to UTF-8 from 97+ & provides the encoding sed for older versions which can be picked up by xlrd:
Extensions
The link to download the template should check for the existence of an .xls in static/formats/s3csv & use that instead of the .csv one where-present.
