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Question to Lone Wolf about Import/Export file details

Z

Zaphod Beebledoc

Well-known member
Not sure how to put this, but here goes.

What details about the import/export files would you want us to discuss on the forums?

Farling's thread about his import from Obsidian Portal has got me excited about the prospect of importing my data from spreadsheet files.

I don't want to say the wrong thing or post screen shots of stuff you would rather be kept off the forum. Hence me asking. :)
 
I was thinking the more of technical details of the files, like the XML tags with the data inside. Most of the content I would be trying to put into RW is my own anyway...
 
There's nothing wrong with creating an XML file structure which matches the export file that you can create from a realm.

I must say that manually creating the XML file from other data is quite hard to do, particularly getting uuids sorted properly.
 
A thought came to me last night about uuids and signatures. Why not have a substitute for them them indicates to RW that a uuid or signature is needed?
 
Zaphod Beebledoc said:
A thought came to me last night about uuids and signatures. Why not have a substitute for them them indicates to RW that a uuid or signature is needed?
Click to expand...
RW should either create anything you omit or report a problem with the import. You shouldn't have to put in a substitute.

A second import without IDs would probably duplicate everything rather than make any attempt at conflict resolution, but that's just a guess.
 
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I'm pretty confident that RW will not import a file that doesn't contain UUID's in a form that it expects.
 
A UUID has a very specific form in terms of hexadecimal characters and "-" separators. I don't think that RW follows the UUID rules about how the digits are chosen, since there is no need for the UUID to be unique worldwide outside of realmworks.

The only UUIDs I have in the OB script are those generated by RW in the first place when I exported the realm structure that I would use for the topics I was creating.

I would like to create my own UUIDs for the topics, so that I can re-import. I may have a look at this later today.
 
Bidmaron said:
Farling, can you explain your usage case? There is nothing stopping you from "reimporting" now
Click to expand...

All the snippets and topics need tagging with their own UUIDs which don't change from one import to another, otherwise all the existing snippets and topics will get duplicated by the second import.
 
Bidmaron said:
Farling what is your use case? You can export and reimport now
Click to expand...

My use case is importing data from Obsidian Portal, where I am creating my own XML file to be imported. In this case I will have to create the UUIDs manually from some other uniqueness provided by Obsidian Portal (likely to be a hash of the URL of the thing being converted) so that a subsequent OP backup can be re-imported to update the existing data in the realm with the latest changes.

(Which is the whole point of this thread, import of our own data not export and import of RW data.)
 
Hopefully Rob will answer the question if it is asked directly,

Can RW import an XML file if it was not created by RW but is in the correct form. We can surely provide some form of UUID's and signatures but they would not be what RW itself expects, obviously, unless LWD reveals how those are created.
 
What is to stop you from creating a bogus realm with a bunch of blank entries, exporting them and comandeeeing the uuids for import?
 
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Farling is working from a previous answer to that question. He asked previously if manually-created XML is possible to import. It is.

As I understand the present conversation:

The problem he has is that if he wants to re-extract from the same Obsidian Portal source later, he has no way to automatically put the uuids in place in the XML other than 1) exporting the imported data from Realm Works just to get the uuids and 2) manually updating the new extract from Obsidian Portal with the uuids so that imported records from the new extract are recognized as updates of the existing topics, and new duplicate ones are not created.
 
Silveras said:
Farling is working from a previous answer to that question. He asked previously if manually-created XML is possible to import. It is.

As I understand the present conversation:

The problem he has is that if he wants to re-extract from the same Obsidian Portal source later, he has no way to automatically put the uuids in place in the XML other than 1) exporting the imported data from Realm Works just to get the uuids and 2) manually updating the new extract from Obsidian Portal with the uuids so that imported records from the new extract are recognized as updates of the existing topics, and new duplicate ones are not created.
Click to expand...
Could you link to that post I missed it.
 
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