JSON vs CSV data source

(Lisa) #1

Hi,
Does anyone know why for JSON data sources you can link to a Source Asset but for CSV you can only upload a CSV file? It makes management of the data really hard, since you can’t just download and edit the CSV file that you’ve uploaded, you have to manage it separately, e.g. by keeping a copy of the CSV you uploaded in the same folder so you can edit and upload it later if needed - that relies on manual processes so it’s far from foolproof!
It seems really strange to me…
Cheers,
Lisa

(Lisa) #2

Further to that, how do people manage their CSV files?

(Bart Banda) #3

Hey Lisa,
The CSV data source asset was added many years ago, back then that requirement was probably not that high. I agree though, would be good to be able to edit the CSV you have updated to the data source directly, either by editing it directly in the Admin interface or linking to an external file somewhere. I’ll add it as feedback to our roadmap to consider in a future release.
I guess one (not so pretty) workaround would be to use a REST asset that calls the CSV data source asset and then spits out the desired format using custom JS processing?

(Lisa) #4

Thanks for the reply, Bart.

I’m interested in the suggestion about a REST asset - do you mean to use the REST asset to ‘export’ the CSV file so you could then update it later? I haven’t used REST assets much but I guess it’d just be reading the JSON output of the CSV Data Source? Would Server Side JS be another option for that? I’m not sure what the benefit is of doing it as REST?

(We have a fair few CSV-data-based applications that we’ll need to migrate to Squiz so I’m keen to figure something out that’s maintainable and scalable for this.)