How to import SuperOffice Documents

Overview

DataBridge already has great support for all major SuperOffice entities like ‘Company’ and ‘Appointment’ for example, DataBridge imports these entities straight into the SuperOffice database to make the data available to your SuperOffice users.

Importing documents into SuperOffice raises a bigger challenge as a physical document/file is required besides the document entity data that goes into the database. Due to this complexity, this feature has some restrictions to consider, so please read the checklist below carefully.

Please note: when we talk about a physical document we mean the actual digital file like a Word or PDF document, a document entity represents document metadata as shown in the SuperOffice document dialog. Both are required to represent a document inside SuperOffice.

Checklist

Please consider the following requirements and restrictions that are currently effective for the SuperOffice document import feature. As we continue development on this feature this list could change over time.

1. While this feature is still in preview it needs to be enabled for you or your customer, please contact InfoBridge support to enable it.
2. As this feature demands much more processing time of our cloud services, additional pricing will be involved to use it.
3. Currently only this profile setup is supported, FTP to SuperOffice:
4. 
5. Currently, it is required to have an import file in a supported format on an FTP server that can be reached by DataBridge.
   1. This is a regular import file with data regarding one or more SuperOffice entities on each line.
   2. Each ‘line’ in this import file can have 1 accompanying physical document when document fields are configured.
   3. The physical documents need to be available on the same FTP connection as used for the main import file, subdirectories can be used, however.
   4. Physical documents are limited to a size of 10MB each, the same file types as SuperOffice are supported.
   5. Also, consider your available storage space when using SuperOffice Online as this differs per price plan.
   6. The speed of document import is mostly impacted by the FTP server and the SuperOffice connection.
   7. Currently, only 1 column of the main import file can be assigned for the path of the physical document, this can be a relative path, only the file name or any other identification value.

forfiles /P D:\ /M *.* /S /D +"01/01/1980"  /C "cmd /c if @fsize gtr 10485760 echo @path @fsize @fdate @ftime"

How to

When this feature is enabled on your account by us AND you have a profile that imports data from FTP to SuperOffice the required configuration options become visible in the DataBridge wizard.

In the ‘Configure fields’ wizard step, you can map document entity fields just like any other SuperOffice entity. Always consider mapping to a proper ‘Document template’ for proper ordering in SuperOffice.

Configure document import

When document fields are configured you will see a document import section on the ‘Destination settings’ page. Here you can configure which file should be copied from your storage location to SuperOffice in regards to the document entity being processed.

1. Field, select the column from your import file that contains the file path or unique value that’s part of the file path. Currently, the file extension must be included with this field when you have mixed file types.
2. File path format, leave this field empty if the selected field in the import file already contains the full file path. Or use the following format to create the proper file path: '/documents/[:value:].pdf', '[:value:]' is replaced by the value of the selected field. So when the current processing line has the value ‘20190001A’ in the selected field we try to load the file '/documents/20190001A.pdf' from your storage location.
   The file path format is case sensitive!
3. Document unavailable action, what to do when no document is available on the storage location. The option 'Continue processing the line' allows you to update existing SuperOffice document entities without affecting the file. Marking as failed or skipped will not create or update any document entities in SuperOffice when no file was loaded.

Be careful when using the “Continue processing the line” option! Without a file, it’s impossible to create a new document in SuperOffice, so in that case, the document entity will fail with the message “A document file is required for this operation but not available”; however other entities on the same line will be processed as usual. So only use this option in case you explicitly want to update existing document entities.

Please consider: just like with the other entity types you can configure duplication handling and default list values, when dealing with documents it’s even more important to make sure these settings are correct.

Run and verify

All offered scheduling methods are compatible with document import, so configure the rest of the profile according your requirements and run it. The processing time required per document depends a lot on infrastructure and file size, so it can take longer than expected.

Afterward the job log will show which file was transferred for each line:

File '43.txt' retrieved from FTP, 23 bytes read.

Depending on the document unavailable action skipped or failed messages will be shown:

This line has failed with the message 'File '49.txt' not read from FTP. The file at '/49.txt' could not be found or does not exist.'