There's a problem that I'm involved with, and I'm looking for suggestions.
We get information from a small-ish number of people (roughly 100-300 per year). We have no control over them other than to require that they give us this information. The information is a single table with a variable number of rows from 0 to potentially thousands. In the past, what was done was giving them a spreadsheet template and asking them to fill that out. Such a solution is still possible, but I'm looking for something better. The issue with the spreadsheet is that we have to give them the template, or else we are sure to get back all kinds of weird and misfit data in all kinds of strange formats. If we gave them a web form to fill out, that would be insanely tedious, since they will already have the data in some kind of electronic form (or at least most of them do, though we have no say or idea what format that will be). What would be ideal would be essentially a web based spreadsheet into which they could copy and paste from an existing spreadsheet, but where we could set the format for the destination both in terms of data type, columns, and requirements (what is mandatory and what is optional). I've seen one control like that, from DevExpress, but it has some licensing limitations that aren't going to work (my understanding is that each end user has to have a license, which is unlike any of their other controls).
The general goal is to get a single table of tabular data with an unknown number of rows, where we can minimize the pain for the end user to get the data to us, while letting us set which columns exist, which columns are mandatory vs optional, and the data types for the columns.
Any suggestions?
We get information from a small-ish number of people (roughly 100-300 per year). We have no control over them other than to require that they give us this information. The information is a single table with a variable number of rows from 0 to potentially thousands. In the past, what was done was giving them a spreadsheet template and asking them to fill that out. Such a solution is still possible, but I'm looking for something better. The issue with the spreadsheet is that we have to give them the template, or else we are sure to get back all kinds of weird and misfit data in all kinds of strange formats. If we gave them a web form to fill out, that would be insanely tedious, since they will already have the data in some kind of electronic form (or at least most of them do, though we have no say or idea what format that will be). What would be ideal would be essentially a web based spreadsheet into which they could copy and paste from an existing spreadsheet, but where we could set the format for the destination both in terms of data type, columns, and requirements (what is mandatory and what is optional). I've seen one control like that, from DevExpress, but it has some licensing limitations that aren't going to work (my understanding is that each end user has to have a license, which is unlike any of their other controls).
The general goal is to get a single table of tabular data with an unknown number of rows, where we can minimize the pain for the end user to get the data to us, while letting us set which columns exist, which columns are mandatory vs optional, and the data types for the columns.
Any suggestions?