Importer

The Importer provides a wizard for importing CSV files into the Indicia database. This will typically be occurrence data, but can also be configured to support locations, species or any other type of information. The Importer prebuilt form is simply a wrapper for the import_helper class’ functionality enabling it to be easily dropped into a Drupal site if required.

To use the Importer prebuilt form on an existing Drupal site with the Indicia forms module installed, simply select Content > Create content > Indicia pages from the admin menu then set the page title, menu and other general settings as you would for any other Drupal content page. In the Select Form Category drop down choose Utilities then Importer. Click the Load Settings Form button to bring up the Importer specific settings. The settings you will need to consider include:

  • View access control and Permission name for view access control - as described under Generic Settings for IForm pages.

  • Type of data to import - Select whether you want to set up an import for occurrences (= biological records) or locations. There is a third option, to use a setting provided in the page URL as a type parameter. For example you would need to append &type=occurrence to the page URL to dictate that the import wizard will allow import of occurrence records. In this instance the type parameter must be set to the singular name of the database entity you want to import into. Suitable options include:

    • occurrence

    • location

    • termlists_term (for term lookup entries)

    • taxa_taxon_list (for species data)

    Its quite unlikely that you will need to import the latter 2 types of data from a client Drupal website, but possible nonetheless.

  • Preset Settings - this setting allows you define preset, or default, values that will apply to every single record that is imported. For example, if you were to set up an import page for a 24 hour bioblitz at a known site then it might be perfectly valid to define the following preset settings, which simplifies the columns that are then required in each and every uploaded CSV file:

    sample:date=14/08/2012
    sample:location_name=Badbury Rings
    sample:entered_sref_system=OSGB
    

    The last of these 3 settings ensures that all spatial references are imported as British National Grid references. Each setting must be provided as the singular version of the database entity name followed by a colon then the field name that you are importing data into. Note that the date field is a special field created to make it simple to set data into the samples table’s date_start, date_end and date_type fields which are required for allowing vague dates to be stored,

More information on the import process in general can be found in the Importing Data documentation.