Hi, I was wondering what the best way would be to get row data from one or more uploaded excel files and to create new entries/rows in a specific record type (not cdt) from this data. Would the 'Import Excel to Database' plugin be a good start for this?
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Yes. Dump the data into a temp table, then process or transform it to its final location.
Yes! Import excel data to a table then construct record type list using the table data
Import Excel -> staging table (via plugin), then query + transform staging data -> Write Records smart service to your Record Type. Clean, scalable, and easy to reprocess on failure.
Don't forget that you can also add in a validation phase between dumping the data to the staging table and processing it to generate your records. Validation ensures you don't generate records with incorrect or missing data and helps avoid downstream processing issues. You can think of the ingestion of the data into the staging tables and the processing of the data from there as a kind of API. In the same way that you'd validate an incoming message to an API you'd want to do the same here too!
As an alternate approach I'd suggest you also check out the "read excel" function(s) - I routinely write a small utility (generally in the form of a Utility Interface) that will import and then (on the same form) digest / parse / transform the data, and write it to the DB at the click of a button. The advantage here is you can preview the transforomation pretty easily before committing it to your table / record type.