Hi Angelo,
Good steps!
In Germany and at FoodCoopNL we use the “external database” option,
found on top of the supplier list (which should really become a
preference to enable or not within Foodsoft). This works with the
sharedlists application, which manages supplier article information. It
also contains methods to synchronise this with supplier (there is a
German standard using FTP, and in NL we parse email attachments).
https://github.com/bennibu/sharedlists (Germany)
https://github.com/foodcoop-adam/sharedlists (NL)
In the NL repository, look at the lib/*_file.rb files for a number of
import formats (it may take some heuristics to parse article information
from the spreadsheets that some farmers send).
Another way would be to use the upload articles functionality in
Foodsoft. It wouldn’t be hard to add support for different file formats
(just like sharedlists has now). Then, after writing an import filter,
you could upload articles directly from the csv (bonus if #113
https://github.com/foodcoops/foodsoft/issues/113 were fixed to allow
updating articles too). The “make articles (un)available” option would
be useful here.
- Willem