I'm new here! and this is my story of woe...
I'm sure (especially my fellow Britonians) have read about the introduction of the Unique Learner Number, which aims to track the progress of any student (British, European, or otherwise) through High School, 6th Form College or otherwise.
Today my task over the past few weeks has been to upload a .csv file using the MIAP 'Learner Registration Service' of all our new students and I have to say I'm not at all surprised about the quality of the system. Here's a list of all the gripes and semi-WTFs:
1. The required format is an awkward twist on CSV - And as such a *7 page document* has been produced explaining how to manually edit the CSV using Notepad.
2. Data cannot contain any ampersands or commas (O'Toole => OToole)
3. Dates are required to be in the format YYYY/DD/MM (Quite possibly the most stupid date format I've ever seen)
4. A validation tool (written in Java, for cross platform goodness) is provided.. inside a self extracting ZIP file.
5. The validation tool and the MIAP upload facility have wildy differing ideas on what is and isn't valid.
6. It has taken 2 weeks after uploading a ~2000 row CSV file for it to be rejected (due to a few O'Tooles).
7. Registering an additional user account for access to the MIAP portal requires you to search for the user (even though they don't exist), as the "User not found" error page is the only one to show buttons for managing user accounts.
8. The user search requires that you specify the privilege set - if you can't remember then tough luck.
What really confuses me is they go out of their way to make sure that a .CSV exported from any piece of software in existence *will not* work without addition work. OpenOffice does not double quote empty fields, Excel just doesn't bother quoting at all, and our MIS system doesn't natively export dates in their hokey YYYY/DD/MM format.
Whilst the file format gripes and such can be fixed by a small amount of perl voodoo, it just isn't right... they even have the audacity to explain how to fix this glaring problem by way of a 7 page document filled with find-replace steps for some clerical monkey. The last step in the doc explains how to manually add a double quote at the start of each line in the CSV file...