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

[simont]

Thinking about this from the other end – "if I were designing a text file format for this job, what would it look like?" – suggests that I might well have chosen a format in which each line starts with the email address, then a space, then the person's name, on the grounds that that's the very easiest thing to parse at the server end. (No escaping necessary, since the only syntactically special characters are the space after the email address and the newline, and since email addresses can't contain spaces and names can't contain newlines, there'd never be a need to distinguish between either character used as a separator and the same character used literally.)

But I suppose #10 conforms to that format even if it would have the effect of claiming that each person's name had parentheses in it, so if #10 still returned an error then that probably wasn't it.

[chrisvenus]

I like your thinking. It is of course quite possible that they are explicitly excluding "special" character from people's names and so names in the parantheses trigger the invalid format...

Of course, if it had been programmed by people who thought about it they probably would have thought to give an example format. :)

We'll probably find that there is a totally different problem with the import and that the file formats were all fine due to an excessively engineered parser. :)

[simont]

Yes, it did occur to me that "file formatting issue" might actually be a bogus error report and what it really means is "internal error in our website which is not your fault and will prevent anything useful you try to do no matter how helpfully you format it".