Excel Importer Error Checking

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Sorry if this question has an obvious answer. I have an application that uses Excel Importer. Ideally, I would like my end users to be able to import data using the Importer. However, in order for that to work, I need to be able to display the results of an import action to my end users. If the import was successful, I want to be able to display number of records imported, processed, etc. If it wasn't successful, I want to be able to show them some information about why not. I am not sure how to do this - does anyone have any pointers? Thanks.
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2 answers
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Hello Mike,

It is good practise to do the import first to some shadow entities just to make sure that the data gets imported first. After the import the user can check if everything went right with just this import.

The second step would be to proces this import. This way you can use microflows to transport this data to the entities of your application. This way you can better handle exceptions, error's and even ask user input. Then if the data is processed correctly you can delete the data of the shadow entities.

I hope this gives you some general direction how to tackle Excel imports.

Regards,

Ronald

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Ronald

Thanks for the response.

The approach you outlined is how my application is built. The problem I am having is at the first step - importing the Excel spreadsheet into the 'staging' entities inside of Mendix.

Sometimes my users won't structure the spreadsheet as the template requires. Other times, there will be a data mismatch in one of the cells (some spreadsheets imported can have 1500 or more rows, so its pretty easy for a cell in the middle of a large spreadsheet to have text information going into an integer attribute, for instance).

Its at this step that I would like to be able to provide a message to my users that is at least a little bit descriptive.

Let me know if you have any other pointers for me.

Thanks,

Mike

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