I'm suppose the best analogy of what i'm trying to do is make a custom "import wizard" for regular data imports, probably about 10 data imports a month of anywhere from 100-1000 rows each.  That i'd like to have an assistant run.

I have a custom module "A" that i want to upload a file to, preferably an xlsx file.  I want to save that file in the record of module A for compliance purposes.  I will have a dropdown menu that defines different "maps" for the excel file, it will define where the key fields are that I want to import.

Then have a function parse that file an import all of the rows as records in a child module B.   I have a fair idea of how to do this with a csv.  I would have a workflow run after the record is created, write a function to .getFileContent(), and convert the csv to a list with .toList(), run a for loop against the list, massage the data as necessary, and then create records.  I have not tested this yet, i'm sure it'll be harder than I imagine, but it should work?

 

I'm struggling with how to do it with an xls or xlsx file though.  I really want to avoid converting the file to a csv on the desktop to prevent human error.

I have a few thoughts on how this might be possible, but maybe there's an easier way?  And i'm not sure if any of these methods will work, just different ideas I've come up with for attacking the problem.

1.) do something with client side scripting and convert an xlsx file to a csv with a js library, but other client side scripts i've written don't seem to reliably work with the Zoho android app for me, maybe my scripts need to be written differently for the android app?  Having this work on the mobile app is NOT necessary, but it would be nice.

2.) similar to idea 1, but use a widget and have a remote server process the data.  I'd like to avoid this.

3.) Could i upload the file to module A, have a function that sends it to zoho drive/sheets, and then have the function read it back in using the zoho sheets deluge integration.  I looked at the deluge sheets integration and haven't figured out if this is possible to transfer an xlsx file from crm to sheets.    I thought maybe the api, I haven't done much with the zoho api yet. But the api documentation i found for sheets says only xls is supported, not xlsx.

4.) Again I haven't done much with the api yet, but would writing the records via a bulk api call be more efficient than doing it via deluge?