Format or for worse

[j4]

Okay, so I am trying to subscribe lots of people to something (the University's team for the Developer Programme of a big company named after a fruit...) and the member management interface says I can upload a file of names and email addresses: "Please choose the text file containing the member names and email addresses and click on submit. You can have a maximum of 200 members in the file." Fair enough... but it doesn't say anywhere what the format for this text file should be. I tried a .csv file (Firstname,Lastname,firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk) and got told that it was expecting a .txt file, but that's the most informative error message I've managed to trigger. Everything else I've tried, I just get the following: "We are unable to process this Member Invitation file because of a file formatting issue. Please check the file and try again."

I have tried the following line formats for this text file:

1. firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
2. Firstname Lastname <firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk>
3. Firstname,Lastname,firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
4. Firstname Lastname,firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
5. Firstname|Lastname|firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
6. Firstname Lastname|firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
7. Firstname\tLastname\tfirstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
8. Firstname Lastname\tfirstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
ETA:
9. As for #2 but comma-separated, no line-breaks
10. firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk (Firstname Lastname)
11. "Firstname Lastname" <firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk>
12. "Lastname, Firstname" <firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk>

None of them work, & none of them give any more information about how to make them work. Am I being spectacularly dim here & missing an obvious upload format? I really don't want to have to add 80-odd people by hand.

ETA: It may be even worse than I thought; when you add a member by hand, you have four input fields: Firstname, Lastname, email address, role [member|admin]. So I guess I have to try adding the role in for all the character-delimited formats. Though the instructions do say "member names and email addresses", not roles. Hrm.

Or I could fill in I have now emailed them via the 'support' contact form, but their track record on actually replying to stuff is lousy, & I need these damn things added by the end of the week.

Comments

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Write a script that fills in and submits the form for you?

[j4.livejournal.com]

Heh. The script would have to be logged in as me, but... hmm.

[chrisvenus]

This is roughly what I thought... If you were using windows I'd probably suggest Fiddler which is an HTTP session recorder and allows replays (so it would be easy for them to all be sent in the same session). I'm vaguely thinking you're a mac user though so this information is not at all helpful...

Good luck. :)

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'm vaguely thinking you're a mac user though

Actually I use both operating systems: MacOS and Linux. ;-)

Fiddler sounds wicked, though... I am now wondering if WebTest Recorder will do something similar for me. Thanks for the pointer!

[chrisvenus]

Yeah, that defintiely sounds like the sort of software that should be able to record a http session and play it back. Though I should probably not assume specs just from the name. ;-)

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind reading the HTML of the page and writing a little program in Python you can use libraries like httplib2 to POST your password to the login page, collect the cookies, and then post to the registration form. Depending on how fluent you are in Python it might be faster than trying to guess the upload format …