Cookbook: Using the Excel fetcher

If using CSV files as input is inconvenient, you can replace the CSV fetcher in all CSV toolchains with the Excel fetcher. For this to work, your Excel file must follow these guidelines:

• it must be in Excel 2007/2010/2013 format (which normally uses the file extension .xlsx)
• the first row must contain column labels/headings
  • all column headings must be unique, and the heading row cannot contain any empty headings
• each row in the Excel file must correspond to one Islandora object (image, PDF, etc., compound, newspaper issue, or book)
• one of the fields contains a unique identifier for each row in the file (in the [FETCHER] section's "record_key" configuration setting, as described below), and
• one of the fields contains the name of the file that is to be used in each of the created objects (in the [FILE_GETTER] section's "file_name_field" configuration setting, as described below).

To use this fetcher in the CSV toolchains, use "Excel" as the value of the [FETCHER] class entry in your .ini file, like this:

[FETCHER]
class = Excel

The Excel fetcher requires input_file, temp_directory, and record_key values, just like the Csv fetcher:

[FETCHER]
class = Excel
input_file = "/home/mark/Downloads/cartoons.xslx"
temp_directory = "/tmp/cartoons_temp"
record_key = "CartoonID"

However, the Excel fetcher does not need the CSV-specific values field_delimiter, field_enclosure, and escape_character.

Note that the Excel fetcher only replaces its Csv equivalent. The other components in the Csv toolchains (the file getter, metadata parser, and writer), all remain the same. For example, if you wanted to use the Excel fetcher with the CsvSingleFile toolchain, the class entries in your .ini file would look like this:

[FETCHER]
class = Excel

[METADATA_PARSER]
class = mods\CsvToMods

[FILE_GETTER]
class = CsvSingleFile

[WRITER]
class = CsvSingleFile

Cookbook table of contents