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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T13:29:27+00:00

I am planning to request the users of the my web application to submit

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I am planning to request the users of the my web application to submit bulk data in the following format.

BatchID:1
TotalRecords:200

Cust:CustID~FirstName~LastName~Age~Dob~City~State~Country
1~John~Abraham~35~10/10/1974~New York~NY~US

Order:OrderID~CustID~Qty~Amount~DOS
1~1~10~100.00~1/1/2012
2~1~100~1000.00~1/1/2012
1~1~10~100.00~1/1/2012

OrderDet:OrderDetID~OrderID~Reg1~Remarks
1~1~12393A~Testing order
2~1~23123B~tesitng order 1

Above shown is just a set of records. One flat file will have upto 200 files.

Do you think this is a right way of doing it? We need to allow batch upload so that users need not enter each record at a time from the website.

If you can think of any other format that will be of great help

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    XML with a defined schema would be a nice choice.

    A couple problems offhand with your format:

    • What happens if the remarks contains a ~? eg. Test~ing Remarks. How to escape this?
    • Are the users of your application all in the same locale? Will they all expect to enter dates as Month/Day/Year? Or will it be Day/Month/Year? Are these UTC dates?
    • Do you need to quickly determine if the user entered “invalid” data (e.g. missing required fields?)

    There are well known XML tools to help with validating what the user is uploading. It’s worth considering…

    I’m not a huge fan of CSV but at least there are well known tools to work with it. however, as I recall there is some variation in the CSV formats. For example, How to escape the comma? Is it by putting the string field in double quotes eg. “My first, second, third” etc. Is it by using \,? etc.

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