Import into MySQL — CSV, Excel & PDF

• Overview
• From
• Into

Importing for your users — or for yourself?

Building a product on MySQL? Your product’s store is MySQL and your users bring files — this page is your integration guide: mapping, validation and review up front, and your handler writes rows that already fit the schema. Read on.

Just trying to load your own file into MySQL? You have the file and the database; the file is the problem — renamed headers, merged columns, a PDF where a spreadsheet should be. See the wizard handle genuinely messy files in the playground (free, no signup). And a run-it-yourself importer is in the works: your own connection string, runs on your machine, every row staged for review — and revertible after it lands. Join the waitlist.

Goal: your users bring the file they have — CSV, Excel, even a PDF or a scan — and clean records land in MySQL without leaving your product, and without you writing a mapping/validation UI. The pattern is the same every time: embed → validate → deliver. Mildport handles the first two; your webhook handler owns the MySQL API call.

1. Embed the importer

<mildport-import
  api-base-url="https://imports.your-infra.example"
  license-key="SIGNED_TENANT_KEY"
  catalog-key="contacts"
></mildport-import>

2. Publish a catalog that mirrors MySQL

The schema lives in a target catalog, not in host code. Create it in the catalog editor (/admin/catalogs on your engine, or embed <mildport-catalog-editor>), match the table you will insert into, and publish. The widget loads that published catalog by catalog-key.

Align field keys with column names (first_name, last_name, email, phone). Mark every NOT NULL column required so the review step guarantees insertability.

Users then upload anything — renamed headers, six languages, XLSX/ODS, even PDF tables — and Mildport’s deterministic matcher plus the review step produce typed, validated rows.

Need the schema computed per user at runtime, or versioned with your app? That’s the schema-as-code path — pass targets from host code instead of catalog-key.

3. Deliver from your webhook

Clean rows arrive on your signed apply webhook; your handler feeds MySQL:

INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, or LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE for large clean batches

MySQL-specific gotchas

• utf8mb4 everywhere — the classic ‘ü broke my import’ is a utf8(3-byte) table meeting real UTF-8; see our encoding guide.
• LOAD DATA has no per-row error reporting worth debugging — validate BEFORE the database, not after.
• strict SQL mode + typed importer columns = errors surface in review, not as truncation warnings.

Why not MySQL’s own CSV import?

LOAD DATA INFILE assumes a clean file. Customers don’t send clean files. Put mapping + validation + review in front, and the database only ever sees rows that fit.

---

Try the flow first: the playground (no signup), then the Quickstart and target catalogs. Prices are published — hosted and flat-annual self-host — at mildport.com/#pricing.