Your pack already lives in a spreadsheet: name, birth date, sex, weight, microchip. On the phone, though, you had to type it in again dog by dog, or go back to the computer to import it on the website. “Import a roster” is now on the phone too, with the same file and the same rules.
What changes
Two ways in. In Dogs, the “⋯” menu offers “Import a roster”. And at the top of “Add a dog”, a “Several dogs? Import a file” link leads there too — that is the screen that follows creating a kennel, the first steps and the “+” in Dogs.
A CSV or Excel (.xlsx) file. Pick it wherever it is: your files, an e-mail, a shared folder. It is read on the phone. The first row names the columns, in any order, in English or French (“Name”, “Birth date”, “Weight”, “Microchip”…). “File format” lists the nine recognised columns: required, optional, and what each expects.
A preview, before anything is created. At the top: “22 dogs to create · 1 row with errors · 1 already in the kennel”. Then every dog with its tick box: its row in the file, its sex, type, birth date, weight, its breed and coat in plain words, its microchip. Untick one to leave it out. Refused rows are listed with each of their reasons (“Birth date: invalid date, YYYY-MM-DD expected”), and dogs whose microchip already belongs to a dog of your kennel are set apart.
“Create 22 dogs”. The dogs are created one by one, as if you had added them by hand. The summary appears under the list: how many were created, how many rows had errors, how many were already in the kennel, how many you left out.
What others see
Your kennel members see the dogs created, like any dog that is added. Nothing else: the file never leaves your phone. Only the kennel owner imports a roster, just as only the owner adds a dog.
What it does not do
- It does not work offline. Like “Add a dog”, creating needs a connection. If the connection drops halfway, the import stops: the dogs already created stay created, the others are “Waiting”, and “Create” sends them again once you are online — without recreating the ones that already exist.
- It does not update a dog that is already there. A dog whose microchip is already in your kennel is not created again, and not changed either. To complete its record, open it, or use “Import health record”.
- It does not fix a row on screen. A row with errors is fixed in the file, then “Choose another file”.
- It only reads the first sheet of an Excel workbook, and a UTF-8 CSV: a CSV saved in another encoding gets its accents replaced by “�”.
- The downloadable template stays on the website (“Import a roster”, on the Dogs page).
The choices we made
The same file works everywhere. The phone's rules are the website's, case for case, checked against the same examples on both sides: the same recognised headers, sex and type written as their codes (male, female_spayed, distance…), a weight with a dot (24.5) — even though a dog's form accepts a comma. A file prepared for one is good for the other.
No “create anyway” for a duplicate microchip. The website offers to tick a dog that is already there and create it regardless. Two dogs of the same kennel cannot carry the same microchip: the creation would be refused anyway. The phone does not offer you a gesture that would fail.
One dog at a time, and a row-by-row summary. If a dog with the same microchip is added between the preview and the creation, only its row is refused (“Microchip taken”), and the others go through.
A date or a microchip that Excel stored its own way. When you type 2020-05-15 in Excel, it turns it into a date; a fifteen-digit microchip number becomes a number. The phone reads what the cell holds: the date, the digits. The website, for now, reads the displayed text, and may refuse those rows. If a file is refused there for that reason, it goes through on the phone.