Importing only sales orders from Excel in FrePPLe 9.8 (importfromfolder/API REST)

[djole988]

Hi FrePPLe team,

I am evaluating FrePPLe 9.8 (Community Edition, Docker deployment) and testing its integration capabilities.

Observation:
It appears that the standard data import process expects a complete data package (all tables: items, locations, resources, sales orders, etc.), rather than supporting incremental or single-table updates (e.g., only importing new sales orders).

My use case:
I want to import only sales orders on a scheduled basis (e.g., from a CSV or Excel), without providing the entire master data set each time.

Questions:

Is there a supported way in FrePPLe Community Edition to import only sales orders (or any individual data type), without requiring all the other tables?

If not, is this feature planned, or do you have any recommended workarounds or approaches for users who want to update just a portion of their data (such as sales orders) on a regular basis?

Is the REST API a better fit for this use case, and is there a recommended best practice for partial data updates via the API?

I understand this may not be a core focus for the open-source edition, but any guidance or suggestions would be appreciated as I am just testing FrePPLe’s capabilities for our workflows.

Thank you for your time!

Djordje Jovanovic,

[jdetaeye]

You can upload into frepple only the sales orders.
But of course you already need to have the items, customers, locations that are referenced by your sales orders.

So for your use case:

• load your items, customers and locations only once.
• you will on a regular basis empty sales orders and reload with new data

Whether you load the data with excel file, csv file, rest api or manual doesn't make a difference for this concept.

[djole988]

Thanks for the previous clarifications.

I’ve confirmed that manual (frontend) import works for sales orders, but the Group/Scheduled Task using importfromfolder skips my file with:

Ignoring data in file: sales.orders.xlsx

The file is formatted exactly like an exported spreadsheet (columns, values, etc.).

The only difference is the name: sales.orders.xlsx (as exported by FrePPLe).

Questions:

1. Is the filename for batch import required to be exactly salesorder.csv (without dots, spaces, or xlsx)?
2. Does the batch import only recognize CSV files, not XLSX, in the folder?
3. Are there any other rules for how the file should be structured or named for importfromfolder to process it?

[djole988]

...the issue was with the file naming convention. Once I changed the file name from sales.orders.xlsx to salesOrders.xlsx, the import worked as expected using the scheduled importfromfolder task.

Thanks for support and clarification.