Hi,
Integrating line of business applications with SharePoint is often a challenge. Despite the tremendous progress in technologies and protocols, such as REST, that make it a lot easier than in the past, older applications might not have those capabilities. In some cases, the only data export you can accomplish is comma-delimited or tab-delimited text files (CSV or TSV, for comma-separated or tab-separated values). This is the most basic textual representation of table-like data that most applications can either write or read.
Once you have the file produced and exported to an accessible location, you need to automate the import process to get the data into SharePoint lists. That's where Smart Import Pro (a component of Ultimate Forms) can help you. Smart Import Pro can automate import of data from emails, databases and web services, so you can set up a polling profile and have the data processed in the background, unsupervised. The latest version of Smart Import Pro also supports CSV/TSV text files!
The file needs to be placed in a location accessible through a URL. It can be a web server or SharePoint, whatever works best for you. You can even use basic authentication to access it on a non-SharePoint web service (on SharePoint, we will access it with the application credentials).
When you set up your import profile, we will read your file and extract "columns" from it. We will then try to figure out what type of data you have in each column: text, number or date, based on the values in the first row of data. We will assign a name to each such column (col1, col2, etc.) and allow you to map them using Actions. Through actions you specify what should be done with the data. You can create new list items, update existing ones or even sync (combining Create and Update).
Normally, we require you to specify a Last Updated date column so we know which items are new and need to be imported and which have already been processed. For text files, the Last Updated column is optional, as it's common to have the file replaced periodically, so the entire file need to be imported each time. You can also use functions to manipulate data while importing (combine multiple columns into one, perform calculations and so on).
Using Smart Import Pro you can now integrate your legacy application with SharePoint (including Microsoft 365) easier than ever before!
