Idea: Generic variation on BulkRegistration

Motivation

Sometimes, you already have the data (e.g. in a table) and now you want to get fancier. In our case, we had a team directory implemented as a table, getting ever wider. We upgraded to a "TWiki appication" with one page per team member, a forms, variables, etc. We needed to migrate that tabular data into multiple pages.

Description and Documentation

I love the idea of BulkRegistration. I'd like to have a generic variant of this that will let me specify any arbitrary (existing) template page which includes a form, specify a table of data values, and say "create as many pages as necessary, using this template, and insert the specified data values into the forms on those pages"

-- Contributors: VickiBrown - 13 Jun 2007

Discussion

Interesting idea. It wouldn't be too hard to do that. Many TWiki applications start out life as tables in topics, and having a way to extract that table and generate a form type and a set of topics would be really handy (even handier if it automatically generated a "topic creator" form as well)

-- CrawfordCurrie - 14 Jun 2007

This is really pretty simple to do with ExcelImportExportPlugin:

1. Copy your table and paste into an Excel spreadsheet.
2. Attach the spreadsheet to a topic.
3. Generate your topics using the excel2topics syntax in ExcelImportExportPlugin.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 14 Jun 2007

And related, use the TopicCreatePlugin to create a set of templated topics for each "data record".

I think bulk creation of topic functionality should be provided by plugins, not the core.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Jun 2007