Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: HOWTO - simple script with some tcllib packages and namespaces

That's good to know - I had hoped there was some psql csv import function.

My real goal though, is to write a package that allows an end user to upload formatted data - I envision csv, non-nested xml, and fixed width files as my import types.

What I am developing will allow the end user to upload a file, the struct::matrix package has some nice tools to analyze column widths etc ...

The wizard will guide the user to table creation based on regex type guessing, etc. Char fields are going to be T-shirt sizes S/M/L/XL/XXL varchar(8) .. varchar(max), other types will map to their native types.

Upload specs will be recorded (like in ms-access imex spec) so users have a template for later uploads.

Final step is a wizard/form to map the data into our acs_objects/acs_datatypes framework.

User should be able to then restrict access, assign notifications, create search on specified fields, and other functions provided by our toolkit.

Rationale: Power to the end user. Clean up data soup. Reduce recurring programming tasks.

This project was the motivation for my TIP (52) about abstract system catalog.

Similar project - www.quickbase.com