What is Delimited?
Delimited is the simple CSV uploader for efficient devs. It is a hosted solution that can provide a configured data upload widget in five minutes for you to copy/paste into your application.
If you are a developer, and you need to build the capability to upload data files from your users into your application, then you are in the right place.
You may have started working on your CSV-upload 1-point user story and now, upon researching the various approaches, gotchas, and pitfalls, are looking for a quicker way.
You may have already added a data-file upload capability to your app and it works, but users are trying to upload large files that drag the system to a crawl or that your server simply won't support. Or they are uploading files with slightly wrong header column names (your app expects a "Name" column but users are trying to upload files with "name " - notice the extra space and lowercase) and you are now being asked to build a mapping screen.
Maybe you've just been asked to fill in a default value during the upload in case users leave a column blank.
In all of these cases, a seemingly straightforward code-in-a-day uploader widget balloons into weeks of work and users are continually finding new edge cases to trouble you with.
Delimited solves these problems and lets you focus on writing the more interesting bits of your application. Configure, copy, paste, test, hear accolades from your colleagues and kudos from your users, and move on to the next story in the backlog - early.
Delimited Features
- Five-minute setup and integration
- Quick configuration of each upload with per-column validations and defaults
- Configurable destination for your data
- Pre-built, slim uploader widget UI element with automatic mapping screen
- Resilient, fault-tolerant uploading
- Lightning-fast validation, normalization, mapping, and delivery to the configured destination
- Smart-mapping to automatically guess which column from the user's file is applicable for the column that your application requires
Delimited Concepts
Delimited requires you to configure a schema that will allow you to support many uploads.
Schemas
A schema is a configuration for the files that you would like to be uploaded to your application. It includes a name and some settings (like which delimiters you'd like to support), and a configuration for each of the columns that your application expects.
It is important to define a schema in destination terms. That means that you define the column names (headers) in terms of what your application needs or wants. Users will have the option to map their files from whatever format they provide it in to what the schema dictates. Delimited helps by automatically guessing which of the user's columns map to the right schema columns.
Uploads
Once you've configured a schema, you paste some code that shows a pretty button on your web application so that users can upload their file. Users will select a file and then Delimited will upload, validate, process, normalize, and deliver the data to your waiting web application.
Next: Check out the Getting Started Tutorial
