Specify 7 WorkBench
Bulk data uploading system for collection management software
WorkBench is a bulk data uploading system for collection management software, Specify 7.
I worked on the front end, including the following features:
- Support for spreadsheets of up to 500,000 rows
- Built-in coordinate converter
- Live and static data validation
- Efficient cell search and navigation
- Keyboard navigation and screen reader support
- Integration with GEOLocate to help batch identify locality data
- Automatic mapping of spreadsheet columns to database fields with respect to -to-one and -to-many data model relationships.
Screenshots
Video review
An overview of a beta version of the WorkBench by one of our team members:
Specify WorkBench demo for SpeciForum 2021
Online demo
You can try out the live version at sp7demofish.specifycloud.org. The username and password are sp7demofish. When prompted to select a collection, choose any option. See usage instructions in the video above.
Technologies used
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- React
- Docker
- Leaflet (library for interactive maps)
Overview of the mapping capabilities
Overview of the mapping capabilities (in Russian)
Things learned
During the development of the WorkBench, most of the testing was done with data sets that were convenient for developers - 20-50 rows with 10-20 columns. It's only in the last few months before release that testing with a real world sizes data sets had begun. This quickly showed as that the tool had obvious performance issues and required us to scramble to fix it and to delay the release.
The lesson I learned from this is that testing should be done though the development process to make sure the tool is on track to meet the goals, and the testing performed should resemble real world use cases.