I can see that there are already a few topics/threads about bulk uploading both historic and new data collected outside of Fixometer, and even one from late last year, but I couldn’t find a definitive answer on how to go about it?
I’m one of the “techy” volunteers for my local Repair Cafe (This one!), and between a few of us, we’ve set up our own ticketing system in AirTable, and have now been tasked with getting data from our AirTable system to the Open Repair Alliance - and Fixometer seems like the best way to do that.
We’re quite aware that our data, new and old, would need to be aligned with Fixometer’s data structure, which will be quite a task for 1500+ records. However, we’re confident in being able to handle it one way or another; we just need to know what the end product should look like!
To that end, would anyone be kind enough to point me in the right direction of an up-to-date template, or any other current information about bulk uploading?
Thank you (and oooh, I’ll be looking up AirTable!) - I was also wondering this… there’s a download button to get it into .csv format, but no upload button… maybe it would be to dangerous…? Following this thread for answers!
I’m glad I’m not the only one! AirTable isn’t the cheapest solution (Though we do get a discount as a registered charity), but we’ve found it to be a good middle ground between ease of use and customisability. Being able to choose what data we record has been a godsend, and lets us create much more interesting and nuanced statistics than if we were solely relying on Fixometer or Repair Monitor; it’s good stuff.
And you’re right about the quality of data being uploaded en masse being an issue, and I belive thats why Repair Monitor no longer allows it at all - Here’s hoping Fixometer is willing to work with us on this one!
My apologies for the slow reply. Great to hear of your interest in data uploads - and great that you’d like to include your data in the Open Repair Alliance data!
There isn’t a built-in way to upload data to the Fixometer. As you’ll have read, it’s a popular request, but also a tricky one! The sticking point is the mapping of the data from each group’s own format to that expected by the Fixometer. It’s not something we can easily automate, and groups often find they don’t have the time to do that mapping themselves. You either have to collect it somewhere in exactly the format the Fixometer expects, which as we know not every groups wants to do, build something to map it for you (I have a Google Sheet that does some simple mapping for my own group), or manually map it after the fact.
Data quality is certainly a consideration, but if you validate the data at import then there’s no major reason it would be any lower quality than manually entered data.
I’ve recently worked with another group to import their historic data via scripting against the Restarters API and that went well. They were happy to do the conversion of the data from their own format to that required by the Fixometer. Joseph if you’d like to explore that then I’d be happy to, as doing it for a group is always a good data point for whether the process could be easily generalised to all groups.
(P.S. as an aside, I’d love to hear more about your use of AirTable Joseph for your group - you could start a thread in the Digital tools and workflows for repair groups category. Someone else mentioned using AirTable recently).
Hi Neil, thanks for replying, and now it’s my turn to apologise for being slow!
I can only imagine the headache that creating a universal solution would cause, and I can see how burdensome mapping all the data would be for many Repair Cafes. Fortunately, we’re in a position where a couple of volunteers are willing to help map our historic data, so I believe we can manage it. We’re just keen to find out what format Fixometer expects - do you know if it’s documented anywhere?
And the thought of (even partially) automating the mapping/uploading process, especially with current/new data, is without a doubt something we’d be interested in. I’ll give the API docs a look and see if I can decipher them with my rudimentary web development skills! It would also be very interesting to hear a bit more about how your scripting project worked/what it looked like, if you’ve got a moment to explain it a bit?
Hi Joseph, my turn again now - apologies, I’m perennially behind on my messages…
I worked with Restarters Barcelona to import ~500 items of historic data. They had it on paper sheets, so were happy to digitise it directly to the format required by the Fixometer. As such, no mapping was required.
Perhaps simplest if I share a copy of the spreadsheet we used:
You’ll see it has one sheet for event details, and one sheet for the items for all events. The sheet with items will give you an idea of the data we imported and thus what the Fixometer expects.
I made a Python script to work against the /events and /devices APIs - Restarters API - if you look at those you’ll see exactly what data is expected. Happy to post that script to a repo somewhere when I get a mo.