Thread: Import to excel to postgres based website?

The answer may or many not be very postgres specific but...what are some
possible routes that I could take to allows users to upload data from excel
into a postgres via a website? I've never tried anything like this before.
Are there standard modules that might help with this or will I have to
create from scratch? I am obviously hoping to find something I can just plug
in. Users would be expected to have the xls ordered properly for the routine
to work.
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novnov wrote:
> The answer may or many not be very postgres specific but...what are some
> possible routes that I could take to allows users to upload data from excel
> into a postgres via a website? I've never tried anything like this before.
> Are there standard modules that might help with this or will I have to
> create from scratch? I am obviously hoping to find something I can just plug
> in. Users would be expected to have the xls ordered properly for the routine
> to work.

You don't say what scripting language you're using, or what platform
you're running on.

If you have a Windows-based server, you could just install Excel and use
ODBC and some macros to open the uploaded file and process it.

If you're on a non-Windows platform then you'll want a module that can
read Excel files. There are various Perl modules on search.cpan.org that
might work for you.

Failing that, you can get people to save as a tab-separated-values file
(possibly via a macro so they just have one button to push). That is
easy to import via COPY.

--
   Richard Huxton
   Archonet Ltd

On Jul 22, 2007, at 11:26 PM, novnov wrote:

>
> The answer may or many not be very postgres specific but...what are
> some
> possible routes that I could take to allows users to upload data
> from excel
> into a postgres via a website? I've never tried anything like this
> before.
> Are there standard modules that might help with this or will I have to
> create from scratch? I am obviously hoping to find something I can
> just plug
> in. Users would be expected to have the xls ordered properly for
> the routine
> to work.

It's something that would be pretty easy, given the right web
platform, quite
hard using the wrong one. Using perl, say, it would be less than a
hundred
lines of code. (Take uploaded file, crack xls format to extract data
using one
of the several CPAN excel reader modules, use DBI to insert it into
the database).

Uploading CSV (comma separated values) is likely to be easier in
languages
that don't happen to have support for xls, but CSV can only represent
a small
subset of xls.

If the webserver itself it running on windows then there's all sorts
of games you
can play by remote controlling an instance of Excel, but doing that
tends to
be pretty fragile.

Cheers,
   Steve

On Jul 22, 2007, at 11:27 PM, novnov wrote:
> The answer may or many not be very postgres specific but...what are
> some
> possible routes that I could take to allows users to upload data
> from excel
> into a postgres via a website? I've never tried anything like this
> before.
> Are there standard modules that might help with this or will I have to
> create from scratch? I am obviously hoping to find something I can
> just plug
> in. Users would be expected to have the xls ordered properly for
> the routine
> to work.

How about converting the Excel file to CSV and loading that in with
COPY?
--
Jim Nasby                                            jim@nasby.net
EnterpriseDB      http://enterprisedb.com      512.569.9461 (cell)

I would recomend MS Access/ODBC.
It works very fine both with linked Excel spreadsheets and PostgreSQL
tables.
Therefore, you can easily automate data import from Excel to PostgreSQL via
Acess.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Atkins" <steve@blighty.com>
To: "pgsql-general General" <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2007 5:29 PM
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Import to excel to postgres based website?


>
> On Jul 22, 2007, at 11:26 PM, novnov wrote:
>
>>
>> The answer may or many not be very postgres specific but...what are  some
>> possible routes that I could take to allows users to upload data  from
>> excel
>> into a postgres via a website? I've never tried anything like this
>> before.
>> Are there standard modules that might help with this or will I have to
>> create from scratch? I am obviously hoping to find something I can  just
>> plug
>> in. Users would be expected to have the xls ordered properly for  the
>> routine
>> to work.
>
> It's something that would be pretty easy, given the right web  platform,
> quite
> hard using the wrong one. Using perl, say, it would be less than a
> hundred
> lines of code. (Take uploaded file, crack xls format to extract data
> using one
> of the several CPAN excel reader modules, use DBI to insert it into  the
> database).
>
> Uploading CSV (comma separated values) is likely to be easier in
> languages
> that don't happen to have support for xls, but CSV can only represent  a
> small
> subset of xls.
>
> If the webserver itself it running on windows then there's all sorts  of
> games you
> can play by remote controlling an instance of Excel, but doing that  tends
> to
> be pretty fragile.
>
> Cheers,
>   Steve
>
>
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Your easiest route will be to have them export a csv file out of excel and write a script to import the csv into the database.