Document import handlers
March 8, 2011 7:52 PM Subscribe
I need to import multiple documents to a couchDB. I am behind a corporate firewall, and we're not going to be able to open a port for contributors to access an admin tool on couchDB. How can I ensure that the docs we get have the fields we are expecting?
So far I've considered:
a Word template (downside - handling many different versions of Word) a Java app that provides an interface and emails it to us (downside - might not be able to get to the email client if they are using web mail) a web app hosted outside the firewall that emails it to us (downside -corp IT might not be OK with this).
Are there any other options that I should consider? My criteria are:
ease/quickness of development ease of use for end-users consistency of input security
Complicating this is that some users will have large amounts of docs to send at one time.
So far I've considered:
Are there any other options that I should consider? My criteria are:
Complicating this is that some users will have large amounts of docs to send at one time.
Best answer: We've had to deal with similar requirements on a recent project. We tried Word templates, YAML, hand-edited XML, and local browser applications, but the end users had difficulty using each of those technologies. We settled on a Java Swing application that generates both human-readable text and a non-readable "data dump" (really encoded XML), which the user can then cut and paste into the mailer of their choice. You can only generate the text/data dump once all client-side validation rules have been met. The ingest process picks up the data dump from the inbound e-mail, makes sure it matches the human-readable form, and pushes it into the database.
This has proven to be a reliable method, but there's been a learning curve for the end users. Early on, many messages came though without the data dump; later, there was a major uptick in validation errors as users got comfortable enough to start hand-editing the human-readable form.
posted by backupjesus at 9:14 PM on March 8, 2011
This has proven to be a reliable method, but there's been a learning curve for the end users. Early on, many messages came though without the data dump; later, there was a major uptick in validation errors as users got comfortable enough to start hand-editing the human-readable form.
posted by backupjesus at 9:14 PM on March 8, 2011
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Probably the easiest way to validate the document before sending it on to your db.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:46 PM on March 8, 2011