[Module] A CSV Import Automator Module

by Benoit Savignac
LOGIsoft

As many of you know, I've been asking a lot of questions on the Forum about getting up to speed with all things Servoy.  Coming from a 4GL background, I had a lot of terrain to cover initially, but as I move along I find the learning curve less and less daunting, thanks in no small part to all the help that I've received from the very helpful Forum posters, whom have been kind enough to patiently help me get over some hurdles I was facing.

This is really nice, and it stirred in me an overwhelming [;~)] desire to give something back to the Servoy community, as many of you have done so generously already.  So, I decided I would share this 'little' module I made to automate the importing of CSV files in a Servoy solution.

This module is part of an actual solution I'm building for a client that needs to gather statistical data from CSV files, some of which are zipped and contain sub-folders.  The user may also want to import a single file or a whole folder of CSV's and/or zipped CSV's.  The module takes care of all these situations automatically.  It will also skip over zip files already processed, without the need for any additional user input.

The main reason why I created this module was because some of the column names (the first row of the CSV files I was provided with) contained illegal characters (such as '/', accented characters, etc.), so the import process could not be straightforward in this case, and would have required considerable interaction on the part of the users.  I also wanted to eliminate the need for my users to keep track of what they imported already.  In other words, once everything is set up properly, this baby makes the whole process totally transparent.

The module uses the free Tools plugin from Marcel Trapman of IT2Be for unzipping purposes, as well as the free Busy plugin from Paul of DNA Diagnostics Center -- you should have both of these installed prior to importing this module.  [I wish take this opportunity to thank Marcel and Paul for their contributions.  Please also see the Credits section for other contributors.]

This module is completely free and unlocked, so please feel free to use and modify it.  However, if you do make improvements to it, I would ask that you kindly share these improvements with the rest of the community. Here's to paying it forward!

Ben
info@logisoft.qc.ca