A happy new year to one and all, my first blog post of 2012
hopefully more to follow projects permitting.
I have used the excellent CMSImport on numerous projects both
with SQL server and CSV data sources. In many instances the
data is not always in the correct format and needs to be massaged.
If using CSV as the data source typically you would use Excel
or some simple text editor with a bit of search and replace,
however there is a much better and powerful free alternative, enter
Google refine.
Check out the videos especially the third
video on data augmentation. I
followed the instructions and managed to insert latitude and
longitude via Yahoo place finder into a CSV file that contained a
list of retailers.
You could easily write your own webservice that does some data
transformation and provided the webservice returns json you can
then use it to massage your csv data before importing using
CMSImport.