Situation

Your client needs a website where they can manage (CRUD) their products (code, name, price, category, etc.). They know that there’ll be times when they need to update the prices or other properties massively, so they want a solution that allows them to do so without having to update every single product independently with the typical update form.

My thoughts

I’ve seen this requirement ☝️ come up in many different software projects. The most common approach to solve it was to let the client upload an Excel sheet with the updated records, then the software iterated through each row and updated the corresponding record in the database.

I also saw the excel approach fail because users messed with the format or maybe left a “not null” value empty, etc. I always thought there must be a better way.

I’m thinking maybe the Google sheets API could be used to provide a more robust solution 🤔, but I’m not familiar with it yet.

Discuss

Have you ever faced this issue? Can you think of a better solution? 🎤

Edit: Just to clarify, I’m not actually dealing with this issue. I just thought it’d be something interesting to discuss here!

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