Importing

I've been using rListing in a demo real estate site. My client wants the listing data from their old CMS to come over to the Drupal/rListing site. Importing the data is a major hurdle for me because of way rListing holds listing data.

Each listing stores data in two tables: rlisting_listing and the table that holds the node title and node body (used for the listing title and description). The rlisting import function doesn't allow me to upload the descriptions; additionally (and this is the major problem) the data dump from the old CMS is a tab-delimited text file with a different field layout than the format required by rListing's importer. Processing the text into the input function's format would be ok for a one-time import, but eventually I'd like to incorporate IDX data from the local MLS, and doing that kind of processing regularly will be a resource drain.

I've found a potential fix that would require a lot of work on the rListing internals but would increase the flexibility for imports. If the fields from the rlisting_listing table were in the listing node table, the node importmodule could be used to create a map between a comma- or tab-delimited text field and the listing node.

I realize that fundamentally changing the central data structure of rListing will require a large amount of work, but the ability to map an arbitrary text file onto the listing node makes importing IDX data very simple.

Currently, I have to write a script to shuffle my listing data into rlisting's import function's format and manually put in the listing descriptions; this is a huge barrier to entry for potential users who want to bring their current listing data onto Drupal and rListing. Unifying rListing's central data structure and using node import dramatically simplifies the platform change and opens the the door for IDX updates.

Please let me know what you think.

- Tyler
tyler@gamefacewebdesign.com