How to automate/simplify this content submission scenario?

Question

I'm trying to think a strategy to automate or simplify content submission. A submission is by default done through a form and counts as one entry (some text fields + a random number of file upload fields). Through a web interface, I can imagine this as a regular form. But how can I automate the process to simplify it?

I don't have a particular solution in mind, just wondering what are the most logical approaches that most people would agree are best in this case. I thought about folder submission where the user selects the paths of the one folder or many folders he wants to submit and the system would then internally analyze the content and break them into either multiple entries or 1 entry, and then populate as many entries as needed just as if it were done through a web form.

Any thoughts on this? What challenges should I expect with this approach and are there better approaches to doing this? I hope it's somewhat clear what I'm trying to accomplish.

Answer 1

One way could be creating a content bundle specification (which does not have to be complicated). For example, it could contain files, and an XML document which contains all of the information on the items to be posted. The user could simple upload contentBundle.zip.

The server would decompress the archive to a temporary folder, then parse the contained XML file. You can then determine how many items have been submitted, validate their contents, pull out the files relevant to each item and do whatever is necessary to store each one as an separate entity. The XML might look like:

<items>
    <item>
       <name>John Foo</name>
       <mobile>+111111111</mobile>
       <image>43.gif</image>
    </item>
    <item>
     ...
    </item>
</items>

Now you can easily determine how many 'items' have been submitted and separate the contents of the archive.