We've got a lot of great updates and improvements to share with you, so let's get right down to it.
The Schema Builder
First of all, if you haven't tried our fantastic Schema Builder yet, then run, don't walk over to the Dromo Dashboard to give it a spin!
The Schema Builder enables you to create full-featured data import schemas without writing a line of code. Just add your fields, define types and validations, give your schema a name, and if you like, tweak the appearance of the importer to match your branding.
Watch the video below for a quick overview, and try it yourself!
Bring Your Own Storage
When it comes to balancing data privacy requirements and data processing capabilities, Dromo offers an unprecedented number of options, and we think Bring Your Own Storage will hit the sweet spot for many organizations.
With Bring Your Own Storage, you get the best of both worlds: your imported data never transits Dromo's networks or servers, and you get data persistence and remote access. We achieve this by uploading the import results directly from your end-user's browser to your cloud storage bucket. We support AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and GCP Cloud Storage.
If you are interested in learning more about Bring Your Own Storage, get in touch with us! We'd love to tell you more.
Hidden fields
Dromo's family of hooks allow you to programatically validate and transform your user's imported data using any logic you can dream of. You can use hooks in conjunction with virtual fields to compute and store derived data from the imported file.
Sometimes, you may not wish to show these virtual fields to your users.
For example, suppose you are importing a CSV of addresses with fields for street address, city, postal code, and so on. You could use a row hook to connect with a geocoding service to get a latitude and longitude for each address. You want to import these corresponding coordinates, but you don't want your user to be able to see or edit them.
This is the kind of problem that hidden fields solve. They allow you to attach internal metadata to your imports, without displaying it to the user.
And they are super easy to use! Just pass the hidden attribute
when defining your field, either in your base schema or with the addField method.
Removing fields
Dromo recently added the ability to remove fields, which allows you even more power and flexibility when defining your schema.
One common example of when you would want to remove fields is when you are concatenating two fields together. You could be importing a "full name" field, but your customers have files with separate first name and last name columns. In this case, you could define first name and last name columns in your schema, which your customers would match to their existing columns. Then, using hooks, you can concatenate the data in these columns into a new virtual field for the full name.
Previously, you would be stuck now with three columns – the imported first and last name columns, and the full name column which you will ultimately import.
Now, you can simply call removeField with the old first and last name columns and continue on
in normalized data bliss!
As always, you can find more info in our docs.
Dynamic select options
Select fields are the perfect solution when you need to import a field with a list of valid options, giving your user an easy dropdown menu to choose.
Sometimes, however, the list of valid options may change based on other data in the row. For example, the list of valid states and provinces may change based on what country a row has.
Row hooks have gotten even more powerful, and now enable you to change the set of
valid select options for a given field on a row-by-row basis. You can do this simply by returning
a list of selectOptions for the given field from the row hook - read more here!
More powerful AI column matching
We're very excited to roll out a new AI engine powering our automatic column matching experience. This upgraded matching engine will result in even better column match suggestions, powered by some of the best AI technology on the market.
There's no action needed on your part – your users are already breezing past the column matching step!
More languages available
The Dromo Importer is fully localized, and we are happy to announce several more languages that are available now! This brings the full list to:
- English
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- French
- German
- Indonesian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Spanish
- Thai
- Vietnamese
Wrapping up
That was a lot of exciting news in one update!
We've got a lot more improvements and features in the works that we can't wait to share with you. Stay tuned!